Oh good, I was quite confused. Good news on the hardware, then.

Can't. When weirdness occurs, it bothers me when I can't find the cause.
As for drivers, hm. Maybe there's some info somewhere which drivers work best with this asshat of a game, I'm just not sure whether someone who doesn't know what they're doing should mess with that.

I know exactly what you mean ; )
Can't help though, I don't have neither the game nor amd gpu.. And I have no clue about their drivers.
Get newest you can find for your card and use Display Driver Uninstaller to uninstall the ones you currently use. Shouldn't hurt much, with Intel/nVidia that's very easy..
edit:
or try running power supply test full screen and for longer, most of time reboots are caused because of psu/gpu..

AMD has its own thing for that, apparently. Install Manager. I have the newest driver atm, if anything I guess I'd roll-back or maybe try the available beta driver. It's just such an irritating affair.
(On a side note, I have found few Google results with similar issues that turned out to be hardware related. Once again, it seems odd that only one game would cause problems if that's the case and none of these diagnostic tools would return any errors, that is what bothers me so much. Exchanging random hardware on the off-chance that it ends up working is not exactly an affordable experiment.)

I'll do that as well, as soon as I can find something else to do with my time. ... Maybe my PC is just trying to tell me to get a life. o_°

As I recall, I consulted http://mikemstech.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/windows-crash-dump-analysis.html

It in turn links to a WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR page at http://mikemstech.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/windbgkd-debugging-processor-cache.html

Thanks for that.
Unfortunately, the SDK refuses to install for reasons that go over my head.

I'm fiddling with BlueScreenView for now which points to ntoskrnl.exe (like WhoCrashed, iirc), of course it would help if I had any clue about these things.

Like the openhardwaremonitor shows plots, so you can see what is happening before the error, when you get the error and after it. You can see clock speeds, loads, voltages and temperatures.
http://betanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/open-hardware.jpg

If your program shows only actual values, you can see only the values after the error.

Crashes with artifacts and such logged events as Event 20 is a clear indicator that your video card struggles with this particular game.

Also "More demanding games" aren't usually more demanding. I saw 2d games with fps lower than in Everquest 2 with max settings.

Also, we speak about Dark Souls, right?

If you want to avoid similar problems in future, avoid unoptimized games and/or use lowest possible settings for them. Such constant load on video card will lead to its quick deterioration.

Ah. No. The pro version apparently includes such graphs. It seems like even a graph wouldn't help much, though, when Windows reboots and all programs are closed - unless it's saved somewhere.


Good points.
Yes, Dark Souls is a crappy port; from what I hear, it doesn't even run all that smoothly on consoles. Funnily enough, I'm not getting performance issues. It can run 2-3 hours without noticeable FPS drops or choppiness, then crashes out of nowhere. I do usually play my games on medium to low settings anyway.
... So you're saying there's probably no way to solve this, other than not playing DS?

After more googling I've found the one person on the Internet who has had the exact same problem as I, albeit two years ago and with a different game. Unfortunately, he never really solved it, but it went away after a RAM upgrade.

Then there was a "random BSoD" thread elsewhere in which someone claimed it has to do with the difference between GPU Memory Clocks and RAM clocks when one gets to a point in a game where lots of shit happens and stuff gets loaded into RAM instead of VRAM - they solved crashes by downclocking their video memory.
This makes me think, as my DS crashes mostly happen when a sudden visual effect appears - an explosion, particle effect or some-such - but it seems that if this were actually a thing, it would be more of a well-known thing. (Or maybe this is were terrible optimization comes in, hell if I know, I don't know how to computer.)

But. Is there such a thing as a general incompatibility between certain RAMs and certain GPUs?

This is still bothering me. Despite how much I fail at the game, I'm actually enjoying it and it bothers me that every time I start it up I basically just wait for the next crash. :<
(Wear and tear on my hardware aside - which is the reason I'm not playing much anymore.)
Maybe I can finally get myself to play Witcher 2 instead.

In the meantime, I ran memtest and the OCCT GPU test again, no errors from either, and I've checked for loose cables and other oddities inside the case. Doesn't look like there's anything wrong.

So, this has never been solved, unfortunately. In the end, I moved on to other games and haven't had any issues since, except just now, XCOM: Enemy Within has had a seizure and caused the exact same BSoD (without actual Blue Screen) + restart. Fun fact: I have over 500 hours in this game since February (don't question my lack of other things to do) and have never had this issue - or any other issues, for that matter.

The crash was easily recreated this time, just making the same move during a turn with the same soldier, same weapon etc. I don't know how much that matters or how much sense it makes to anyone not familiar with the game, but I suppose "same circumstances" will do. After the 2nd or 3rd crash of this kind, I altered my moves and everything was fine.

Once again, I did a search for the issue. It seems to have various causes: GPU voltage, CPU shenanigans, faulty RAM, not enough power from the PSU.
Once again, my GPU temperatures while playing are reasonable (65°C at most) and the game runs well.
Once again, I'm clueless and helpless. I've been considering a GPU upgrade lately, but as long as this randomly occurring issue cannot be pinpointed, I can't justify spending my booze money on computer hardware.

Maybe now, someone can help me pinpoint.

Over the years I've had problems like yours a couple times. You probably have a better chance of winning the lottery than successfully troubleshooting the cause without swapping out hardware.

I solved my problems with trips to a store with lenient return policies, so i could swap out hardware until it was fixed. Replacement video cards usually solved the problem in the end, sometimes with the exact same card model.

When it is predictable like that, it's likely a bug in the program itself. Something in the game logic is FUBAR'd, gives garbage results and an exception gets thrown.

When its completely random, then it's possibly a voltage, faulty RAM, power etc.

Hm, yes. Balls. That is, unfortunately, the exact impression I've been getting ever since it first happened. Maybe I should just go in the direction of a new GPU, anyway.


What if it's both? Come to think of it, there was one cutscene in Dark Souls that would always trigger it, too, ergo predictable. Just the fact that there aren't a whole lot of reports of other people experiencing it makes me think the problem is on my end.

So in my case, it could be either or even both, I'm guessing.
The save file check sounds reasonable, but also a bit like too much of a pain in the ass for whoever would be doing the checking, what with mods and all.

I'll think about that hardware exchange/upgrade thing a bit more.

Meanwhile, thanks for the replies!