Resolved Game Crash when attempting to save

[Lorkhan]

Summary: Game consistently crashes when attempting to quick save or auto save. Quick save may work for 3-5 attempts, but will always cause a crash eventually. Already performed a clean reinstallation of Bannerlords 1.2.8 and manually verified redistributable. No mods. Windows Defender controlled folder access is not running.

If relevant, this is the first time I'm trying to get Bannerlords running on a new PC. I previously had Bannerlords running on the old PC.

How to Reproduce: Start new campaign, attempt to quick save. Run around and quick save a few times until crash occurs.
Have you used cheats and if so which: None
Scene Name (if related):
Media (Screenshots & Video):

Computer Specs:
OS: Win 11 Home 23H2
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 Laptop
GPU Driver Version: 537.58 (not the latest but newer drivers cause other issues)
CPU: 13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13900HX
RAM: 32 GB DDR5
Motherboard: LNVNB161216 SDK07T76461 WIN
Storage Device (HDD/SSD): 2x 1 TB SSDs

 

[MArdA TaleWorlds]

The issue you have reported has been forwarded to our QA team for further investigation. We might need additional information regarding this issue, such as screenshots or videos, save files or dump reports. Thanks for reporting and sorry for any inconvenience!

 

[Lorkhan]

Thank you, I'm standing by for any requests for information.

I have continued to investigate this myself and may have a clue. I was previously running with GPU overclocked and CPU undervoltage. I disabled both to default settings and seemed to have better stability.

This is a crash log for (1) starting with default GPU and default CPU voltage, then (2) turning on GPU overclock to prior setting (no effect), (3) turning on CPU core undervolt (no effect), (4) turning on CPU P cache undervolt (no immediate effect), (5) turning on CPU E cache undervolt (no immediate effect, but crash few saves later).

Dump id: 2024-01-05_20.22.52_41bc3e557ebc389b3694ad0f662d4286

I will investigate further since I don't know for sure if it was actually CPU E cache setting causing the crashes or something else, but overall it seems like these had an effect on stability. I did extensive stability testing when first setting up GPU/CPU tuning, with many benchmarks and actual game tests and did not any issues with these settings. If CPU undervolt is indeed the issue, I'm not sure why Bannerlord seems much more sensitive to these settings.

Also, probably unrelated, but I noticed in this same save that this crash dump is from, the start Iron Arming Sword seemed to have some issue rendering. I have a screenshot at the below link, but I'm not sure how to insert into these forums.

Arming Sword bug:

 

[Lorkhan]

This issue can probably be considered resolved. I was able to maintain a campaign for several hours with zero crashes after setting CPU E cache undervolt to zero. Before, this would crash in a matter of minutes. The other settings i mentioned before, (GPU overclock, CPU core undervolt, and CPU P cache undervolt) were set to their prior values, so it seems definitively due to CPU E cache.

I had no issues with CPU E cache undervolting during any benchmarks or other games, but seems to be that Bannerlord is extremely sensitive to this setting. I tried a few values, but it seems like any non-zero CPU E cache undervolt caused crashing. Performance gains were minimal, so I just set to zero and haven't had a crash yet.

Thanks