Twice till now game crashed to black screen and I had to force restart whole pc (not only crash to the desktop). I have nvdia geforce 970, 16 gb ram and i7 procesor. I have found some similar problems with black screen on the internet and I think that it is caused by graphic card - 970 gtx because all thse problems are similar with this card. Maybye overheating or bad driver, I do not know, but I have the lastest version of nvidia drivers.

I own the same card and have 0 problems. If you really suspect your graphic card first thing I'd do is shutdown your pc pull out the power and remove your graphic card make sure it's sitting the the PCie slot firmly after you reinsert it.Then download and run this benchmark Unigine. If your PC does not shut itself down you can be sure it is not an overheating issue. If it does; however, contact your vendor for a replacement.

Let me know about further developments after completing the benchmark and will give further tips.

Do not listen to vbiasi...her advice is worthless to say the least. Anyone who suggests sending your card back to the vendor because you have a problem with a new game like many people are having here and also on steam should not be advising anyone.

Since the game release my computer also would crash and I have tried windows 8.1 8 and 7 , I downloaded who crashed and it was reporting the same problem everyone who was crashing was having, the NVidia card couldn't recover from a timeout so I have tried about 20 different drivers, turned all settings down and no matter what I tried the game would just bomb out my pc to restart. This was very frustrating and I know how it is for you from my personal nightmare.

Two days ago I copied and pasted The Witcher 3 folder on my caviar blacks raid 0 installation to a SSD (solid State Drive) and FIXED for me.

I have every setting in the Nvidia control panel set to maximum and in game I have everything on ultra, I don't use vsync and the game is looking amazing and very smooth with not one single crash.

I am thinking the CPU & GPU are working in tandem in this game (just like the final test in 3DMark11) and because SSD's read/write 10x faster there is no bottleneck. Even though my caviar blacks in raid 0 are fast, they can never compare to an SSD and the fact that I have fixed my problem with this game by putting it on an SSD tells me my computer was being bottlenecked playing this game on Hard Drives.

This worked for me and I am just sharing my experience with you, and all that read this, this fix I found FIXED my problem and may not be a fix for anyone else, also my opinion on why my pc was crashing like over 100 times before I fixed it is my opinion only based on what knowledge I have and not from an expert or some kid who thinks she can re-invent the wheel.

I hope this works for others also, after cut and pasting to a SSD just go to configure on GOG and select import folder and browse to your SSD and it will be verified and installed properly on your pc without having to download the whole thing again.

Good Luck

Vicyboy - 47 year young gamer

P.S. I thought i better click edit and put in my system specs

Gigabyte X58A UD7 Mobo
Nvidia EVGA Classified GTX680
Intel i7 Gulftown 6 cores overclocked 4Ghz with Intel water cooler block and radiator
Corsair 12Gb dominator ram overclocked 1600Mhz with cooler fans
Corsair HX650W PSU
Asus Xonar Essence ST sound card
2xCaviar Black's 650 (1.3 TB in RAID 0)
1xToshiba SSD 128 (windows installation)
1XOCZ Agility 3 SSD(The Witcher 3 installation)
2xOCZ SSD 64 RAID 0
Samsung BLU-RAY player
Samsung 37" LED
Steelseries mechanical keyboard
Logitech G700s mouse
Sennheiser PC360 headphones
Seagate 1TB usb3 portable drive
Harman Karden Soundsticks 2
TrackIR

Agree, don't listen to vbiasi their advice is total rubbish.

The blackscreen crashes you are having are TDR crashes, or "Driver has stopped responding and has recovered" crashes, if you've seen that message before, its that type of crash. Problem is sometimes when this happens in the witcher 3 the gpu is not recovered and the computer basically hardlocks with a blackscreen, yet sometimes you can still hear music in the background. It's a TDR crash, although when windows is unable to recover the driver its basically a blackscreen of death that requires a manual restart. This has happened to me many times lately.

This has happened to me a lot lately, especially after 1.04 was released. I don't remember it happening that much or at all until 1.04 came out. It happens frequently and randomly and there's nothing anyone can do about it until CDPR releases a new patch to fix whatever they broke, or nvidia releases a new driver.

This is not an issue on the user-end and there's nothing you can do other than wait for a fix. I even tried lowering my perfectly stable overclock and it still TDR crashed. Sometimes it makes it to the desktop with a successful recovery message, but most of the time when it happens it fails to recover the gpu and you get a blackscreen and manually need to restart.

Also vbiasi, my card can run heaven and valley benchmarks all day long without a problem, that doesn't mean other games work the same as a benchmark. The witcher 3 is highly unstable right now with 352.86 as of patch 1.04.

I sent nvidia 5 TDR crash errors from the witcher 3 so hopefully they can do something about whatever the hell is going on with this game.

Also vicyboy: I have an ssd and I still get these crashes frequently and randomly. I don't think putting it on a HDD or a SSD matters in this case at all.

Monitor: ASUS VS248 1920x1080
Windows 7 64bit sp1
MOBO: ASUS P8P67 DELUXE rev3.0 / bios 3602
i7-2600k @ 4.4ghz
8GB DDR3 2133
EVGA Gtx 980 // Bios: 84.04.1F.00.80
Samsung 830 250GB SSD
Keyboard: Logitech G110
Audio/sound: Logitech G35 7.1 headset.
Mouse: Razer Deathadder 2013 edition

It was the TDR crashes i was getting also, i mean seriously over 100 times, i also said it was a fix for me and just something for others to toy with. I am using the up to date drivers also as i forgot to mention that and i also have my windows swap file set at 2048 min and 2048 max. I'm just trying to throw info in the pool as my problem is 100% fixed and i find it hard to believe myself as like yourself i would get TDR reports from who crashed so i can only assume it is a data bottleneck.....i been through hell and back and i know how it is for everyone...but after reading the first reply i thought i better say something about my experience and that you dont need a 900 series card as my 600 series runs it on ultra and deffinately do not need to buy a new card for a game.
I hope you find a fix soon

Vicyboy

First of all it was just a first step to check if his card was faulty before going into writing an essay as you have done. There are many things that could be going wrong on his end. OZuna first suspicion was overheating hence I referred him to a benchmark so he can verify if it is faulty. Secondly learn to read I suggested he should contact his vendor only and only if the benchmark fails and his system shuts itself down. There is a clear difference. And obviously a perfectly functioning card can run a benchmark all day. Without actually receiving more information from him your approach of writing an entire essay is a complete waste of time.

I cant believe you just wrote this reply...people are seeking help not internet trolls. You said yourself you do not have the problem and by your advice you are giving you are no help at all.

My essay as you describe it is intended for the poster to maybe solve his problem, and not your uneducated opinion about something you clearly know nothing about, and yes i can read quite clearly, just have never understood bad manners.

Apologies to the OZuna who come here for help, personally i wont be posting anymore on this thread because i hope you find your fix for your problem, i really do hope for your sake that vbiasi does not get this thread locked down from his trolling....good luck my friend

Vicyboy

Roll back the game ready driver for Witcher 3. It's buggy as hell. My gtx 970 crashed even on chrome with that one, and many times in W3. Rolled it back to the GTA V driver, no problems.

First of all I'm not trolling. And you seem to think your approach is correct. Suggesting switching to an SSD for a fix is apparently expert advice? Simply jumping to conclusions with the little information he has given and assuming he is in the exact situation as you are is apparently productive. Solving such problems requires step by step process of elimination and receiving feedback from the person having the technical issues. First of which is to make sure it is not a hardware issue itself. Personally your rudeness has put me off from helping at all.

Check the windows event log [both system and application] to see the reason your system crashed.

you can copy the text by highliting the text, and using control + C, then paste it here.

1) right click computer icon on desk top
2) click manage
3) click +event viewer
4) click +windows logs
5) check both application and system log files

all the best

I played 40 hours of witcher 3 without any problem, then after patch 1.04 it has happened twice. Have to restart computer as I can't get out of the black screen. I can however access the taskbar and get the shutdown screen with ctrl-alt-del. I can even start up task manager, but I can't shut down witcher as the black screen remains, even though the other windows are running in the background and I can see them on the taskbar mini preview.

I hope this is fixed.

-edited- Turning fxaa off didn't work.

Yeah i have everything ticked and running game on Ultra since installing the game on a dedicated SSD, my TDR crashes was due to data bottlenecking as GPU and CPU share the workload and my HDD's didnt have the bandwidth, well that was my fix to my investigated problem anyway. And i also use the latest drivers for mt GTX680

Vicyboy

Well turns out turning off FXAA in control panel didn't stop the crash. It allowed me to play the game a bit longer before tdr crashing but in the end it still TDR crashed after around an hour of gameplay.

My nvidia control is pretty much at default values other than DSR and prefer max performance setting. Even removed reshade/sweetfx and it still TDR crashed.

I'm out of ideas at this point, its the damn driver or whatever cdpr's 1.04 patch did. Game is unplayable, unless anyone likes crashing every hour.

Have you tried a clean install of your driver? Somewhere between the release day driver for GTA 5 and now they were errors coded into one of the driver updates itself which caused numerous issues that did not resolve themselves until a clean install.

This involves:

1. Download the latest stable driver. (The Latest driver is working smoothly for me with my 970 without a single black screen)

2, Type "Device and Printers" into your start menu and open it. Right Click on your PC and select "Device Installation Settings". Select "No, let me choose what to do" and "Never install driver software from Windows Update".

3. Go to "Program and Features" and filter by Nvidia and uninstall everything listed under this category. You may have to reboot several times.

4. Go to "Folder and Options" and select "Show hidden folders".

5. Next Step is to remove all traces of Nvidia on your OS drive.
remove the "Nvidia" & "Nvidia Corporation" folders from:
/Program Files
/Program Files(x86)
/ProgramData
/Users/Yournamehere/Appdata/Local
/Users/Yournamehere/Appdata/Roaming

6. Type regedit in your startmenu and press enter.
remove the "Nvidia" & "Nvidia Corporation" folders from:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software
HKEY_Users (Seach all folders here for traces of Nvidia).

7. Reboot.

8. Load the install you downloaded in Part 1. Make sure you have no background programs open like your browser steam and such as this may cause conflicts. I generally choose custom and select clean install with Nvidia installation.You can also create a system restore before you start the uninstall and after the uninstall has been completed if you like being extra save.

Anyway hope this works for you. It did for me.If not your only option would be to revert to 1.03 patch or wait for a fix.