I have a problem with Witcher 3 too. I finished the game once and started a new game +. In the first mission when you get Ciri from the wall and bring her to Vesemir, after the cinematic where she is scolded by him and send to practice on the dummy, the screen goes dark and I don't hear any sound. If I start task manager I see that the game is not responding.
Can anyone help, I really want to try the new game + and do some things differently.

I had crashes like these totally random and at (least in my case) and found out it was related to my paging file, Since i had none cause mine was off, i turned it on and put 2gigs of paging file and it was all ok.
I did not use paging file before cause i got an SSD and its software advises me to turn it off.
But so far so good im done with the crashes, they happen no more.

My system specs: I5 4670k @ 4.4Ghz
8 GB RAM
Radeon R9 280x (latest crimson drivers)
Windows 10 Pro

Well,
Since I had SLI on my old rig i've always set page filing up.

My SSD has 12gigs set aside for it, i've tried without and with, i've also tried disabling streamer service and stuff (got me one day was able to play 4 hours with no issues then it CTD again)

Tried going back previous drivers and its still having didn't start until i downloaded HOS
So idk.. getting pretty upset with it, had no issues with my 980 and before i had HOS.. kinda shitty man.. really dig the game..

Hi I am having issues too. It began last week. Before I played teh game more than a 100 hours. I was in a new game + and already played 20 hours and one day the game just crashed without me changing anything in the config or the driver or patching the game. The repairing function of GoG didn't worked out. After reinstalling the game it worked for two days without crashes. Now the game is again crahing when I am on the introduction screen. There is no error message it is just crashing and the mentioned solutions on the GOG Support website aren't working either. Don't know how to get this fixed.

Well after WEEKS of trying to resolve my crashing errors I finally was able to play like 6 hours straight with no crashes. Previously just the game would crash, other times the entire PC would crash, so I posted my crash logs into a forum for some MS folks to decipher and they told every single issue in my logs pointed to drivers.

Considering I had changed drivers about 100 times....updated to latest driver, back to prior ones (like the last 10 previous drivers), back to the one I had installed last year....and nothing worked, I was not very optimistic that this was indeed the issue. So, to be sure though I went and did a custom install of the latest driver at the time. I did a "clean" install and opted to NOT install Geforce Experience (I also uninstalled Geforce Experience before the install) and just did the install via the Nvidia driver site, the old fashioned way.

Well, guess what? Not sure if something was corrupted and the clean install fixed it, the fact I did that AND removed GF Experience...I don't know, but that seemed to work, and I was able to play for 2 days, >6 hours one day alone...with ZERO crashes (before i couldn't go 15-20 minutes without some sort of game or pc crash).

All good right? No. Well I didn't get to play after that for a few weeks, logged back in a few days ago....GOG updates, no updates for Witcher though....start playing it, 15 mins in, crash. Restart it SEVERAL times, and it just keeps crashing. Tried again today and now I'm actually getting a random PC crash again (i.e. out of the 10+ times it's crashed maybe 2 of them also crashed my PC). So, i went and looked and there were like 3 driver updates since I had last logged in, so I updated my drivers again, still crashed. So...I did what I did above, went in did a clean install of the latest driver (no Geforce Exp).....still crashes.

So.....I don't know if this is similar to the same crap I was experiencing before or something new that has surfaced and is just causing similar problems, but either way this is very annoying as I've been waiting since last year to pick the game back up and play through both expansions all at once, now the new one comes out in like a week and I can't play the game for more than 15-20 minutes again (if that).

I'm not sure what changed between this year and back in Nov (when I'd logged well over 100 hours to the game with no issues), but it is highly unstable now. I am very frustrated at this as well because I just bought a 980 TI late last year just for this game, and while I did get to play it a bit last year (with no issue - but i was almost done with the game then and was holding out on playing the first expansion until I could play both of them back to back), it was only for a little bit to finish off the game...now I just can't play.

Anyone else have this happen or start seeing issues sometime earlier in March, when everything was fine before?


- VERY Frustrated TW3 Player

i have the exact same problem. after installing HOS the game started crashing over and over again really frustrating and im using a r9 380 card from saphire btw.

Chiming in with the same issue. I'm running an i5, 8gig Ram, Nvidia 660 Ti on Windows 7 Pro.

I managed to play over a solid hour the night before Blood & Wine went active. Out of the prologue, in to the main game with time to look around and enjoy the scenery before switching off. No problems.

Today the problems began after the game files updated and I updated my nvidia drivers since I haven't done that in a while. I also had Nvidia Experience loaded up so I can optimize the settings before playing. Now I don't get 2 minutes before the game crashes straight to desktop, with only a couple of notes to point out driver failure on the GPU. Even with the settings on painfully low, the crashes persist.

Judging from some of the other posts here, I'm thinking the culprit may very well be the updated nvidia drivers, as well as the experience suite. Or more besides. Which is a shame, since though my rig may be a few years out of date, it was handling high settings fairly well. If I'm honest, I should have been a lot warier of needless nvidia driver updates, as I lost my 560 a year ago to a faulty update that fried the card. I suppose I've only got myself to blame now.

I'm going to attempt a fresh WHQL update and run a clean install, skipping any of the additional software. I'll post the results of that soon.

Same issue here, decided to do a new game once the latest expansion came out. Played through the entire prologue without issues. Once I entered the first big map I started getting random crashes. No error log, nothing, just crash to desktop. Tried doing clean install of drivers, tried under clocking my cards, tried uninstalling experience. Same exact issue.

Whats annoying is that its so random, you could be playing for hours and it would be fine then suddenly crash, or you could be playing for minutes and then suddenly crash.


My specs: 3 Titan x's in Tri SLI, i7 4930k running at 4.5ghz. All water cooled and temperatures are all fine.

So I might be onto something. Again I am not 100% sure but I noticed that the more you play the more frequent the crashes get. Let me elaborate. I started my PC this morning and played the game for about an 1 and got a crash, then managed to play about 3 hours and got another crash. Now I can't manage to play more than 15 minutes without a crash.

Maybe its something to do with memory management or something?


Edit: never mind, after a cold boot I crashed within 5 minutes of gameplay...so annoying.

okay, my problem is that the game crashes when I reach certain areas after 1.21 update. Specifically, in Toussaint. For example, in 'There can be only one' quest, when I reached the Isle where you do the quest, it crashed. Also, when I reached an abandoned area with a spriggan and some wraiths, it crashed. When I was doing the Smitten Knight quest, when I reached the race practice ground with that knight guy, it crashed.

See, I use a low setting with a low gig. So I tend to tweak graphics here and there to maintain good FPS. So, I experimented by using a default setting, no crash during the There can be only one quest. At the cost of massive FPS. I've been trying to find workarounds for this, like setting 'objectmemorytrigger' to 512. It seemed to work, then it crashed anyway after making a little progress in said areas.

what is the cause of my problems?

EDIT: Seems it was not the graphics but the GoG overlay was the problem. I cleared one abandoned site in Toussaint with no crashes after disabling it on galaxy and playing the game without galaxy. Could be wrong however.

Im also experiancing the same crash/freezing issues, seems to be for me since patch 1.22, anyone else figured out the problem. I had logged 100 hours no issues previously

Having the same issue and no idea on how to fix it.
I'm currently looking at the system events and see several warnings that say that the graphics driver has crashed and been recovered and also that the witcher3.exe has failed to access the graphics equipment. After that - one error and one critical saying that previous shutdown was unexpected (I reset my PC because it stopped responding).
Does anyone know why in the world the witcher3.exe process could not access the graphics card?

Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 5
Core i7-6770K
GeForce GTX 970
Patch 1.22

the issue is G-SYNC AND VSYNC. Once i turn those off game runs flawless on SLI/ Ultra settings 90 to 108 fps.

Just wanna mention that I got a CTD without a warning while going through the settings. Haven't started the campaign yet. Patch 1.22 ofcourse and I have CrossfireX and vsync on. I'll keep on gaming with it on and if it happens again I'll try disabling vsync.

Had no problem what so ever when the game first came out.

This issue haunted me for a long time (Witcher 2 and Witcher 3, Fallout 4). First I thought it is HDD/SSD did some testing and all seemed fine. Stress tested my overclocked GPUs (all good) and returned my GPUs to factory settings (just in case) -> Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 still crashing.
After next crash I dived into the .dmp file and as far as I could tell there was an issue with file system and or hardware so first thing in admin command prompt sfc /scannow found some issues in the file system (not sure whether this had to do with anything - probably not but anyway 1 bug less). That didn't fix crashes though.
So now to the hardware - stress tested overclocked CPU (all good) - no issue there but games were still crashing. So removed the overclock all together, both from my CPU and GPUs and no more crashes. For the first time in over 277h of gameplay I could play with no crashes for good few hours straight. :D