The issue has still been not fixed, but luckily I can also confirm that setting core affinity fixes the crash. In my case, I have an hexacore CPU (AMD Ryzen 5 2600), so I set affinity to CCX0 (cores 0-5) on Process Lasso and the crash didn't happen anymore. It seems that either setting affinity to a single CCX/CCD on AMD CPUs or disabling SMT works. Don't know if Intel CPUs are also affected, but if it's caused by poor multithreading support, then I think they are.

AFAIK, logical cores are reported the same on AMD and Intel CPUs. If you want to disable SMT/HT, then set core affinity to either all even (0,2,4...) or odd (1,3,5...) cores, as both threads are identical to Windows.

So I got hit with this as well. Intel processor. Eight cores. My CPU doesn't have hyperthreading, which is interesting, diagnostically.

The first couple of times I crashed, I was entering the boss area with the anchor centred in my display. I also crashed a few times after the boss spawned some of those floating hiss.

Through trial and error, I was able to come up with a workaround to beat the boss. I was able to complete the fight by looking at the floor, and when I heard the audio cue that the boss was charging up to attack, I would glance at it long enough to chuck a clock at it, quickly shifting my gaze back to the floor and floating to another platform. When it did spawn enemies, I was careful to take them out without looking up too much, or looking at the anchor. Through this method, I was able to whittle its health down, and cleanse it as expected.

Hard mode, effectively, then, and it took a few tries, but it felt pretty sweet when I won.

Given how many people this affects, and the wide range of hardware of those affected, it's a shame they shipped it like this, and it's a shame they haven't since patched it out.

Found this link in the Steam Forum.

I fixed it with:
1) Disabled Fullscreen otimazation
2) Set CPU Prioroty to high
3) And muted ingame all the sound options

Teste Step 1 and 2 before the audio without success, so I think the muted audio fixed it for me

My setup:
Intel i5 13600K
Gygabyte Z790
AMD RX 6700 XT

Muting the sound solved the problem. Nothing else needed.

I had a different fix for this issue I haven't seen mentioned on this thread. I'm running a 4090 with i5-13600k.

Was getting crash to desktop at the anchor fight. Only fix that worked for me on this thread was disabling most of the cores. But it was almost unplayable so I also needed to do the one hit cheat to get past it.

Later, I realized the nvidia driver updated and I was getting a line in the cutscene. I had previously used the below fix to disable rBAR, but forgot you need to redo it every time the nvidia driver updates. Ran the cutscene fix and out of curiosity did the anchor fight again, no crashes and no need to disable cores, sound, or decrease graphics settings.

1) Download the latest nVidia Profile Inspector github.com/Orbmu2k/nvidiaProfileInspector/releases
2) Open it and search for the profile of Control
3) Go to the 5th category, Common
4) Change rBAR Feature from Enable to Disable
* redo these steps every nvidia driver update

Here's where I found the rBAR disable fix:
reddit.com/r/controlgame/comments/11vzizn/horizontal_line_and_jitter_in_all_cutscenes_how/

I confirm this is the only solution, quick and easy, thanks bro with this i was able to beat the anchor without any crash just mark mute copyright music and all audio set to 0 , thanks for your solution :D have a great day bro

I'm usually playing with dx12 and raytracing on.
Changing to dx11 for the anchor fight at least worked for me.
Maybe try this one first before turning to more complicated solutions. Good luck!

Tried all the fixes that were mentioned on here. Lowering the settings, turning rebar off, using DirectX 11, etc.

Still crashes for me whenever I face the Anchor. I don't know what to do other than just avoid it.

My PC specs are:
CPU: Intel Core i7-12700KF (12th Gen)
GPU: Gigabyte GTX 1080Ti AORUS Xtreme Edition 11GB
MB: Gigabyte Z690 UD AX DDR4 V2 LGA1700 ATX
RAM: Cosair Vengeance DDR4 (16GB)
Power supply: Thermaltake Smart BX1 - 80 Plus Bronze (750W)

I believe this is correct. I too had a consistent crash at the very start of the fight, right when the Anchor first opened its mouth. I've tried all solutions from this and the other discussions, and the last one, which was Vista compatibility, seemed to work. After I played a bit in the non-crashing fight, I died which caused the game to update my save. I then removed the Vista compatibility and the fight didn't crash anymore, so apparently something is saved in the game's save which prevents the crash from happening after it didn't crash for the first time.
After that I reverted to my older save, and indeed the crash happened again, consistently, at the same moment, with or without Vista compatibility.

So now I have an always (or almost always, I suppose) crashing save, and a never crashing save (I tested it for about 3\4 of the fight, I didn't finish it nor did I test the arcade version of the fight, but at least it never crashes at the beginning of the fight anymore).
I tried the always crashing save with the Steam version, and as expected, it doesn't crash. I also noticed that the when the GOG version loads, it shows a black screen for a few seconds between the company logos and the epilepsy warning (I think), another issue which the Steam version doesn't have. Shame on Remedy for not fixing this crash which was obviously caused when they converted the Steam\Epic version into the GOG version. :(

By the way, I noticed that the GOG version creates a file named stats.bin in the save directory, which is partially encrypted, and the Steam version doesn't use this file, it apparently uses stats.ini instead (plain text) - anyone knows what this stats.bin file is for? Is it used in-game, or for something else? I don't want to lose in-game information if I'm moving my save from GOG to Steam.

tl;dr: The anchor battle code has a game engine bug, use an older, slower CPU and set priority to high.

I too hit this crash to desktop with the Anchor fight. Always happened first time when it spewed the clocks using DX12.

Ryzen 9 7900x
Radeon RX 6700XT
Windows 11 22H2

Using DX11 instead will get me further but it will always crash to desktop when the Anchor's attack hits a hiss enemy. There are a lot of people saying use the other ddl but when you pick DX11 it uses the platform_rmdwin7_f.dll. DX12 uses platform_rmdwin10_f.dll. I played with renaming the dll files but it doesn't really matter just use DX11 instead.

I tried pinning affinity to only four cores. I tried increasing priority to high in the task manager. I tried disabling sound. I dropped graphics. None of this works.

So I got fed up and used the cheat 1 hit kill. But I didn't like that outcome. I wanted to beat that boss fair and square!

Then I got to thinking about how this game came out in 2019. Maybe our new gen of processors is simply too fast for this game engine. I threw a computer together out of spare parts using a CPU from 2014 and moved a backup of my save game across.

Windows 7 64bit
i5 4690k
Radeon RX570 4GB

Set graphics to min. Windows 7 only has DX11 so that is the executable and dll file it uses. First time I made it almost all the way through the Anchor fight before the game crashed. Promising!

2nd time I launched the game I set priority to high in task manager. Beat the boss! To prove it wasn't a fluke I reloaded and played around with simply avoiding the clock spew and letting it kill hiss enemies on purpose. Crashing avoided!

This is a really nasty engine bug that has no fix.

After I had sent a bug report to Remedy I took some time to investigate.
Nothing of the suggested ways worked here. I tried them all.

I finally got it to work using a combination of 2 suggestions.
With those I could fight the anchor boss and take my time as long as I wanted.

I repeated it several times and there was no CTD any more.

-set the task priority to high.
-set the core affinity to the first 3 cores which have numbers that are even. 0,2,4

-eventually disable ray tracing during fight if the FPS are too low.

Maybe modify it a bit. Those settings worked for me.
Maybe use 4 cores: 0,2,4,6 and check if it (still) works.
Or try the first cores: 0,1,2,(3)...

Only a combination of task priority and core affinity worked here!

I know this will affect me again playing the DLC. Curious if it still works then and even more curious if Remedy finally reacts on this nasty persisting bug that seems to be only a gog related issue.

For everyone here that keep posting solutions - did you try to check whether your "fix" work a second time? It can be done very easily with a simple save backup - back up your save file when you're facing the crashing Anchor, and after you think that you've found a solution to the crash, revert to that saved game, and see whether your solution will consistently solve the crash. Prediction - it won't. It seems that after enough tries, the crash will not happen, as it's not a 100% reproducible crash.

So, the only real solutions are to either try fighting the Anchor repeatedly until you're lucky, or get a different version of the game. All these placebo solutions just cause new players to needlessly mess around with their computer and waste time.

This is interesting, I didn't know that those Hiss don't always spawn, but it does match my conclusion that this crash is random and will happen or won't happen regardless of all the "solutions" that people keep posting. However, from what I remember, after you get lucky once and the crash doesn't happen, it won't happen anymore on the same save file even if you repeatedly go to the Anchor, which makes sense because this is what causes people to think they found a solution (they repeatedly go to the Anchor using the same "non-crashing" save file), but it also means that it won't even crash if the Hiss do spawn again.