An update to this: I did some tweaking to my settings. After some research, this is a problem for Nvidia cards and games built in unity. I noticed the crash only happened in unity games. (It also happened in Path of Exile, but I still have yet to figure that one out.)
So, I went into my nvidia control panel and restored default settings. I then enabled vertical sync. I put a framerate limit of 58.
I downloaded MSI Afterburner and underclocked my GPU, I turned my “Core Clock MHZ” down by -52 , though I am playing around with the ideal value
In last Epoch settings, I set foreground framerate limit to 45, and background to the lowest it allows, 15.
The info about underclocking came from here
Reddit Post
I don’t think I am out of the woods just yet - I expect more crashes. But I was able to do some monoliths without crashing like I did.
Edit: Nope, crash still happening. Game was playable for about half a day before it happened again. Looks like I will be hoarding my clams towards a new GPU instead of Last Epoch cosmetics. Will be a while. Good luck, travelers. May Eterra bless you.
Edit: 3/10/2024 - I could not stay away from Last Epoch. And my curiosity to solve this problem keeps nagging at me. So here I am.
tl;dr - I have not yet solved it. But I have more pieces of the puzzle which might get us closer to a solution.
So, the GTX 970 apparently has 2 sets of VRAM - a 3.5 gig one, and a .5 gig one which is slower. A post I saw on reddit suggested to never exceed the 3.5 gig threshold. I don’t know any way to limit the maximum a particular program can take, so the next best thing was lowering graphics settings. Resolution was the setting that affected memory usage the most. So I reduced it to 1280 x 720. I also turned every other graphic setting down to either “off” or its lowest possible setting. Framerate limit to 60, background framerate limit of 15
Additionally, I opened LE with administrator priviliges (changed it to default to admin mode.) Not great, but it might avoid problems.
I played on a level 14 rogue for a little bit and watched my GPU’s VRAM usage. When you first open the game, the VRAM usage maxes out at 4.0 GB, the limit of the 970. It seems to be an initial load. Then after the initial load, it goes down to about 2 GB
I played a bit, and I noticed something interesting: As time progressed, my baseline VRAM usage slowly increased. In resource monitor, you could see a slowly but steadily incrementing line. This suggests to me that assets aren’t being unloaded from memory after use, causing them to build up. And given the age of the card, the memory usage builds up faster than the card can keep up with.
Either the assets are not being unloaded after they are done with, or there is a set time for them to unload that is longer than what the GPU can handle. It most certainly won’t affect newer cards, as they have loads of VRAM. But with a limit of 4, and soft limit of 3.5, the unload time really seems to hit it hard.
As I said, not a solution yet, but I am getting closer to a workable solution.
(The real solution is upgrade your GPU to something more modern. But I am poor and stubborn, so here I am.)
Tinfoil hat conspiracy: Several people I have talked to that use Nvidia GPU’s have said that in the past few weeks, their games have been performing worse and some have had more crashes. Around that time was when this issue began happening for me too. And also around that time was a forced windows update. So maybe there is a connection? Is Nvidia or microsh@ft doing planned obsolescence on older cards? Just a thought. Maybe somebody who is really smart with hardware can look into it.
