Posted December 04, 2014
I have no idea why this worked for me, but I was having issues with the game crashing during saving (and corrupting the savegame, in the case of quicksave), crashing during transition, and generally running much more poorly than it should on an i7 with dual GTX 470s. The crashes all seemed to be OpenGL related but I was not about to try to revert back 10 years of patches or anything. Checking around it seemed like many suggested turning of "shiny water" in the Advanced Graphics Options Menu. This didn't seem to do anything for me but I left it off so I suggest you do the same.
At this point the game was still crashing somewhat consistently and running poorly. Now here's the weird trick: I noticed that when I went into Video Options, and then went into Advanced Video Options, my screen did the "resolution change black flicker" thing, seemingly for no reason. When I returned to the game it looked a little different and ran much better. It also stopped crashing on saves and loads (mostly, I think it may have crashed a couple times when water was on the screen or a particular effect, so I would alternate real saves with quick saves and always created new savegames instead of overwriting) and the mouse movement became much smoother. I've since put about 30 hrs into the game with minimal issue, though if you alt-tab back and forth to the game it will mess everything up.
So everytime I start the game, at the main menu (before loading a save) I click on Video Options, then Advanced Video Options, the screen goes black and comes back, then I back out and load my save and the game runs better and doesn't crash anywhere near as much. I recommend making a new savegame also each time as soon as it loads up to make sure everything is cool.
Again, I have no idea why this is but I assume it will work for some other people. The fact that it is working consistently for me is the only reason I'm posting it here; it's a pretty weird fix but it made the game way more playable (I think it doubled my FPS); I only tried this with the vanilla campaign in Win7 Ult x64, btw, with hdmi output to a 40 in tv so who knows.
At this point the game was still crashing somewhat consistently and running poorly. Now here's the weird trick: I noticed that when I went into Video Options, and then went into Advanced Video Options, my screen did the "resolution change black flicker" thing, seemingly for no reason. When I returned to the game it looked a little different and ran much better. It also stopped crashing on saves and loads (mostly, I think it may have crashed a couple times when water was on the screen or a particular effect, so I would alternate real saves with quick saves and always created new savegames instead of overwriting) and the mouse movement became much smoother. I've since put about 30 hrs into the game with minimal issue, though if you alt-tab back and forth to the game it will mess everything up.
So everytime I start the game, at the main menu (before loading a save) I click on Video Options, then Advanced Video Options, the screen goes black and comes back, then I back out and load my save and the game runs better and doesn't crash anywhere near as much. I recommend making a new savegame also each time as soon as it loads up to make sure everything is cool.
Again, I have no idea why this is but I assume it will work for some other people. The fact that it is working consistently for me is the only reason I'm posting it here; it's a pretty weird fix but it made the game way more playable (I think it doubled my FPS); I only tried this with the vanilla campaign in Win7 Ult x64, btw, with hdmi output to a 40 in tv so who knows.