I guess i'm frustrated. I bought this game as a promotion with a graphic card (gtx 970) Was looking fwd to playing this but didn't get a chance due to life circumstances. So currently have a bit of free time so i decided to install the witcher 3. I can't even get past first few minutes of my game without it crashing. I have to hard reset because the monitor completely goes blank i do hear sounds of the game. I have to hard reset my computer in order to get back the desktop. I have to admit i do have the game on ultra settings because it the reason i bought the graphic card. My comp specs are as follows 500w gold rated power supply 40a on +12v rail (i've read that power supply was the issue for some user with the gtx 970. Is this psu to weak?) EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB SC, i7 4790k @ 4 ghz. and 8gb of ram. Can someone help me out. I've tried changing power management mode in settings and uninstalled geforce experience. I did change the window settings to full because it was on bordered and still i get crashes. I would appreciate the help. Graphic card drivers are up to date. As it was part of my troubleshooting game crashes. I did a safemode drive sweeper and a clean install of the current driver. I don't know what else to do and don't want to drop the settings to low. that would mess up my experience.

manage 3D settings, preferred refresh rate; set that to: aplication-controlled

This fixed my fps spikes/dips after talking to a vendor.

There could be different reasons for this. You should open the event viewer (I'm just guessing you're on Windows) and look for critical errors and errors. If your PSU is to weak (or if there is something wrong with it), you should find clues there -> look for Kernel Error 41. (It should be noted though that restarting the pc by pressing the on/off button causes this error as well). Another reason could be your oc'd CPU.

Since w3 is a hardware hungry game it is going to stress it more than other games. I hope I could help a little.

Same issue. My game crashes every 10 minutes or so. It has to be down to one of the previous updates because when i played it months ago, i could OC my GPU with MSI AfterBurner but now it crashes faster when i do so.

Running the game without any 3rd party apps will still cause it to crash after a while and i tried lowering most settings to either medium or low hoping it may remove some of the stress as it seems to stutter for a few minutes before crashing.

MS1 R9 270 2GB oc
i3-3240 3.2ghz
8GB Ram
Windows 10
Latest AMD driver (previous also crashed)

My specs aren't anywhere near the OP's but in the past i stayed above 30-40 fps whether now it seems worse with my settings lowered.

Tbh i don't have that option.

Tbh i dowloaded GOG galaxy did a repair on the game. Didn't see no error and i run it from there. So far so good. I don't know what else but i will enjoy the game as much as i can before it crashes again. Im not convinced that this is over. I did turn off my kaspersky btw so i don't know if that helps

Well it happened again. What's this- Windows failed fast startup with error status 0xC00000D4... this seems to be what's crashing my game. Am i reading this correctly. Damn i want to enjoy some witcher

Windows 10, there's your problem.

Well that sucks :(

Well it does not have to be a w10 problem. I'm running w3 on w10 perfectly fine - However your black screen issue seems rather odd. I don't know if fast startup is able to crash witcher, but you should be able to deactivate it in your BIOS (or UEFI).

How to read event viewer: That would go beyond the scope of a simple post. The easierst thing to do is to note the time when the game black screens and look for errors or critical in your event viewer at that specific time. Does your w3 create a dmp file when it crashes?

This is a symptom, not the cause.
If you have a crash & windows is not shut down properly, it can't write an image to hiberfil.sys.
Without that fast startup can't work and you get that error.
You can disable fast startup in the control panel > power options

I haven't had a single crash with Witcher 3 on Win 10, so that is not the problem.

I would stress test your PSU & your memory.

Yep, no sh!t.

Ok i disabled my fast boot and the same thing. This time i noticed before my hard reset. There's a new error. it has something to do with the dwm.exe eventually leads to display driver to stop responding. Gosh it really seems like a windows 10 thing.

There is a registry workaround for a display driver not responding bug.
You should keep in mind that this is a workaround and does not actually solve the problem you are having...