Let's Fix "Renderer Error" Once and For All

Aprel · Aug 28, 2014

tl;dr: I've been trying to fix the Renderer Error by myself by debugging the Civ5 application. I've found a common pattern across the crashes that I experience, and need other affected forum members' help to fix this. See the post entitled "How To Help" below.

Longer version:

Hello, Civ Fanatics

There is a 10-page thread on this forum full of Civ5 players whose gaming experience is plagued with this infamous "Renderer Error" crash aka "FGXRenderer11:

resent failed hr=DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED. Driver failure."

I am among one of the many affected, and have read that thread in its entirety, as well as scoured the web for solutions. None has fully resolved the issue for me, and it seems many other are still in this situation. The combination of my desire to play this game and its unplayability brought on by this error has led me to search for a fix myself. I've noticed that the flavor of this crash that I'm experiencing is reproducible, and I've been stockpiling turn-before saves to investigate the cause.

I have spent the better part of my free time for the past week examining this issue along with the portion of source code that Firaxis released. Using a debugger, I have isolated the error to the same method call in all my turn-before-crash saves. It is possible that the "Renderer Error" can be mitigated or fixed entirely with a software patch from Firaxis.

My intention with this thread is to hash out in forthcoming posts what I have uncovered and how I went about it. I will then ask other forum members who are affected by the "Renderer Error" to reproduce my steps with the Visual Studio Express debugger to determine whether the cause is the same across multiple machines. If that proves to be the case, we can then go about getting the attention of Firaxis to release a fix.

Yeah I know they're busy with Beyond Earth

But it won't hurt to try. At the very least, we will have a better understanding of the crash and how it might be avoided.

More to come...

Aprel · Aug 28, 2014

There could be more than one cause of these crashes. Let's eliminate known causes of "Renderer Error" first. Implementing these may fix your issue partially or entirely:

Manually increase GPU fan speed. My nVidia card does a horrible job of making sure it's cool. Running hot (let's say greater than 70°C) causes crashes. Search for a free program that allows you to control the fan. I use nVidia EVGA Precision X.
Set Leaderhead scenes to "Minimal". Not ideal, kinda boring, but appears to generate some crashes, so for the time being let's eliminate that known cause.
If using an nVidia card, set "Prefer maximum performance" on Manage 3D Settings in nVidia Control Panel. This might not actually do anything, but it's suggested in several similar threads.
Disable GPU Texture Decode. The introduction of this setting in a patch co-occurred with the onset of this error.
Research known issues if lacking updates or playing old savegames. Internet searches reveal several previous issues like no-city-left-AI bugs or too-many-city-state bugs. Make sure Civ5 is updated you're not stuck in a pre-patch savegame.

Aprel · Aug 28, 2014

Crashes are frustrating, not just for players but also developers. So many things are going on in Civ5 that it's a miracle it doesn't crash every turn. In a perfect world, developers would eliminate all crashes, but the complexities of game development make that unfeasible.

Likewise, we can only eliminate one cause of the "Renderer Error". Hopefully it's the cause that's affecting the greatest amount of players. However, we need to get on the same page as to what error specifically we're talking about in this thread.

Does Civ5 crash as soon as you run it? Sorry, can't help you. Every time you start a Huge map? No can do. Every other Thursday at 5PM? Nope.

It's not that I don't want to help, but those are such broad issues that it is a completely separate effort to get to the bottom of them. Hopefully you can find some general advice on graphics troubleshooting to resolve them. Meanwhile, if your crashes occur under the same conditions as below, the rest of this thread will be useful to you. Above all else, your crash must be reproducible (consistently under the same conditions at least on your machine).

Here is specifically the crash how I experience it:

Only on AI's turn. I have only had the game crash when the AI was taking its turn. This is either another civ or the city states. I wouldn't rule out barbarians as being the same issue; I just have never experienced it on the barbarians' turn.
Reproducible. You should have a save that no matter how many times you reload that save, it always (or at least almost always) crashes on "Next Turn" when the AI proceed. It crashes whether you load it having been playing Civ5 for hours, and it crashes whether you just turned on your computer. It crashes on the same AI's turn.
Playing DirectX11
Leaderhead scenes on "Minimal" (other graphics settings irrelevant*).
Vanilla civ (haven't tried the expansions, but let's stick to basic first).
No mods

*I've found turning all the graphics settings to "low/minimal" gets me past the problematic AI's turn, but I haven't found a single setting that consistently mitigates crashing on "low". Moreover, the different settings should have an affect on frame rate, not stability.

Aprel · Aug 28, 2014

This post is technical, and if you don't care, you should skip it. It's primarily here as a reference of everything I have done to remind myself if I have to look back.

Given the reproducibility of this crash, I wanted to take a closer look at what was going on under the hood of Civ5 to see if there was any clue for a fix. I found out that Firaxis had released a large portion of the source code. What if I could find out where in the source the game was crashing and write a workaround?

The first hurdle was getting the source code. It can be downloaded in Steam as "Sid Meier's Civilization V SDK". Look under Library-->Tools. Lots of good stuff in the SDK, but we're interested in CvGameCoreSource".

The next hurdle is compiling it. Follow directions here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=479374

Then drop the dll into the main Civ 5 directory. Rename the original. You need to drop the pdb file too if you want to do meaningful debugging.

Start up Civ5 and make sure everything is ok and the compiled dll doesn't cause a dump right away. Now that that's good, you can modify the dll code as you want.

My first way of going about this was a "poor man's debugging". I wasn't sure how to properly debug, so I just dumped in several logging calls in different areas of the code. CvGame and CvPlayer in particular have a lot of logic I wanted to explore. Here's a summary of interesting cpp files and their jobs: http://modiki.civfanatics.com/index.php/Basic_DLL_tasks#Basic_Civ_5_DLL_Architecture

A good logging call is

Code:

gDLL->netMessageDebugLog("I want to log this message");

Make sure logging is turned on in your config.

The last message in my log before I added any calls was "setTurnActive() for player x" so I searched that string. It's in CvPlayer.cpp line 11938, so I put several logging calls around that, loaded up Civ5 and a crashing savegame, and looked back at the logs.

I eventually realized I didn't want to rely on that logging. I couldn't tell when Civ5 crashes whether some log messages get lost before they're written. I gave up when I came across this post on how to do proper debugging of Civ: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=506328 It's for mod debugging but can be adapted to debugging the main dll.

After I put in some breakpoints, I attached the Visual Studio Express 2008 debugger to the main Civdx11 application. It helps if you load the savegame and then attach the debugger, as the debugger is temperamental. It crashes a lot, which certainly doesn't help when debugging crashes.

The debugger would stop the code at breakpoints and I'd Step Into tracing the different calls. I was running into a lot of disassembled code and realized that despite the large source released, there was still a lot of application logic hidden in the main program whose source is unpublished. None of the source code I was looking at looked too troublesome, except for CvDllGame:

estroy() in CvDllGame.cpp, which was called before the crash, actually a long time before and doesn't seem to be problematic after all.

I finally noticed the crash being reported on the debug console,

Code:

Microsoft C++ exception: _com_error at memory location

I enabled in Visual Studio under Debug->Exceptions->C++ Exceptions so that the debugger would break execution when the exception was thrown. At last, I had a stacktrace:

The stacktrace is both good and bad news. Good news to have the detailed stacktrace at all, but bad news because it shows that the code that is causing the exception is in the closed part of the application. In addition, my exploration of the published source gave me the impression that the call couldn't be circumvented in the dll, and it makes sense, because the Renderer Error was always a DirectX error and it's clear the D3D11 logic is in the closed application.

Here's the takeaway from the stacktrace: Firaxis's code calls a DirectX11 function ID3D11DeviceContext::FinishCommandList, which ultimately throws the Renderer Error. I figure all the d3d11 in the trace from CBridgeImpl above is implementation private and I searched for ID3D11DeviceContext::FinishCommandList, which turns out is in the API: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff476424(v=vs.85).aspx

And sure enough! It specifies when DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED is returned! :

Returns DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED if the video card has been physically removed from the system, or a driver upgrade for the video card has occurred. If this error occurs, you should destroy and recreate the device.

Fail. All that excitement for nothing! Poo-poo on Microsoft for returning an error specified for the wrong reason. No, I didn't remove the video or upgrade the driver while I was playing Civ5.

All is not lost. Now we know exactly where in the code that error is generated, and if it is generated in the same place across saves and across different PCs running DirectX11, it's a good chance there is a software bug in the Civ application code that can be fixed to rid us of this error.

I loaded other savegames, and when they crashed, they brought up the exact same stacktrace. Every time.

It's not enough, however, that I get the same stacktrace on different games on my PC. In the next post, which is coming tomorrow, I will walk through the easiest way to get access to the stacktrace on your PC. It will become significant if many people's game all crash in the same place in the code. Hopefully if that's the case, we can make an appeal to Firaxis. I mean, come on, I've already done the hard part for them

Aprel · Aug 28, 2014

How to help

Make sure you're running the DirectX10/11 version of the game!

If you are getting Renderer Errors that are reproducible, you can help us get rid of this problem once and for all. This section is divided into how best you can help depending on how comfortable you are getting under the hood of the game.

Before getting started:
Try the possible fixes in the 2nd post of this thread and see if that solves the problem for you. In particular, make sure your video card is not overheating.

Basic:
A:

Play Vanilla Civ 5 with no mods. Turn of expansion DLC. Playing Vanilla Civ offers a baseline and eliminates any problems or oddities that could be introduced in the expansions. Mods can introduce crashes of their own, as well as combinations of mods that are stable by themselves.
Set autosave to 1 turn. If a game crashes with Renderer Error, we want the save to be as close as possible to where the error occurs.
If you get a Renderer Error, load autosave and replicate everything up to just before the Renderer Error occurred. Save before performing the action that caused Renderer Error
Verify savegame crashes again after performing crash-inducing action.
Upload save to this thread. Provide information on what to do on load to trigger crash. Specify when crash happened on your PC, e.g., during which AI's turn. Include anything else you think is important, especially video card manufacturer and model. Better yet, include your DxDiag as a txt attachment.
Keep all saves! If we find a possible fix, we'll need you to go back to your savegames and see if the fix consistently gets you past.
Try proceeding by loading in DirectX 9. Load the crashing savegame in the DirectX9 version of Civ. Get past the action the causes the crash, save again, and resume playing in DirectX10/11.
Repeat. Play more in DirectX10/11 and get more instances of crashing savegames. You don't need to upload every crash, but rather a small collection of different stages of the game (let's say no more than one per era). This will be useful to check whether crashes are more prevalent in early or late game. Play some of the game in DirectX9 if the crashing becomes unbearable to advance farther in the game.

B:

Download others' crashing savegames.
Follow their steps to replicate the crash.
Report whether or not they crash for you as well.
Try each savegame more than once.

Intermediate:
This section walks you through how to install and use the Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2008 debugger to debug Civ 5. This is especially useful if you have a crash in a savegame that others are not able to replicate. The debugger isolates in the code where the crash is occurring.

Follow the first three steps here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=479374 You don't have to bother compiling any code; this is just to bring up the debug menu in Visual Studio.
Open Visual Studio.
Go to File->Open Project and navigate inside My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\CvGameCoreSource. Open CvGameCoreDLL.vs2008.sln
Go to Debug->Exceptions... Enable/Check all C++ Exceptions. Click "Ok".
Leave Visual Studio open and start up Civilization V. Change Civ options to Windowed Mode (aka disable Fullscreen).
Load your savegame and click "Continue Your Journey".
Move the Civ window aside and get back to Visual Studio. Go to Debug->Attach to Process....
Find CivilizationV_DX11.exe on the list of processes. Select it and click "Attach".
Give the debugger a couple seconds to attach, and then leave Visual Studio open and go back to Civ.
Initiate the crash.
Visual Studio should pop up with a dialog immediately prior to crash point.

Spoiler :
Click "Break".
Click "Call Stack" in the Debug sub-window in Visual Studio. You may see some lines in the call stack that are solid black and others that are gray. Right-click on the each gray line, and go to "Load Symbols From"->"Microsoft Symbol Servers". Agree to the terms and conditions if they pop up.

Spoiler :
As you go through the grey lines loading the symbols from Microsoft, you'll notice those lines will become solid black and add more detail. However, some lines will remain gray because Microsoft doesn't have symbols for them. Most notably, the CivilizationV_DX11.exe application will not have any symbols associated with on MS's servers.
After you've tried to load as many symbol files as are available, take a screenshot of the call stack.

Spoiler :
Click the green arrow near the upper left of the Visual Studio window. This will resume the programs execution. Tell VS to pass the exception back to the application
Anticipate more errors before the application ultimately crashes. Repeat steps 11-16 and examine the call stacks. They are likely identical or very similar and don't warrant you taking separate screenshots. Just look out for whether there is a significant change in the call stack.
When Civ finally crashes, detach the debugger with the red square in the upper left of Visual Studio. Do what you must to force-close Civ.

Extra: You may also be interested in the debug console output to get a summary of the exceptions. Be aware that not every exception causes a crash. For example, I get a lot of "0xC0000005: Access violation reading location" exceptions loading a save that don't immediately cause a crash. Civ ignores them and moves on.

Spoiler :

Note: Attaching the debugger to an application as complicated as Civ 5 can be a temperamental process. If Visual Studio keeps crashing before you get to the Civ crash, try variations on when you attach the debugger. For example, you might try scrolling around the map to load textures before attaching the debugger.

Advanced:
Whatever technical feedback you can offer about this issue is very much appreciated. If you have ever worked with coding d3d11, your expertise is especially needed. Scan over my technical post above, particularly the stacktrace, and the information others have offered.

Civ5 is a proprietary application; however, about a year ago part of the source code to the gaming-logic DLL was published by the developing studio to assist modders. The released source code does not contain any of the graphics code and has shown (to me, at least) limited usefulness for getting at this problem. Nevertheless, it could help us circumvent the application call that ultimately causes the Renderer Error. The DLL source code can be downloaded in Steam (as part of the Civilization V SDK under "Tools"). You may also browse it here: https://github.com/Gedemon/Civ5-DLL

Aprel · Aug 28, 2014

Reserved for if I need to add one more post to the main.

Petek · Aug 28, 2014

Thanks for all your work on this annoying problem. Did you try disabling GPU Texture Decode in the video options? Doing so may have fixed the problem for some players. I believe this option was introduced in the same patch that caused the renderer error, so the two may be related. If that doesn't help, please post one of your save files that demonstrates the reproducible error. I've never received the renderer error, so it would be interesting to see if I can reproduce it. If disabling the GPU Texture Decode doesn't help, I'll raise the issue in the staff forum to see if we can bring this to Firaxis/2K's attention. I'm not optimistic, however, about them patching the game at this point. Assuming that the faulty code can be identified, would it be possible to create an "unofficial" patch to fix the problem? Thanks again.

Aprel · Aug 28, 2014

Petek said:
Thanks for all your work on this annoying problem. Did you try disabling GPU Texture Decode in the video options? Doing so may have fixed the problem for some players. I believe this option was introduced in the same patch that caused the renderer error, so the two may be related.

GPU Texture Decode has been disabled, but thanks for mentioning this. I have added it into the troubleshooting post above. Also, is there any way to get the pre-patched version of the application to try?

Petek said:
If that doesn't help, please post one of your save files that demonstrates the reproducible error. I've never received the renderer error, so it would be interesting to see if I can reproduce it.

I've attached a Babylon save per your request that crashes during Siam's turn, but if you've never gotten this error, I doubt you will. Worth a try, tho. I have a feeling this is being caused by a complex interaction between the video card, video driver, d3d11 code, and Civ5 application code. Some people just aren't affected by it at all, it appears, but its widespread occurrence and reproducibility make me doubt that people's setups are exclusively or even mostly to blame.

You must launch in d11, and to give you the best chance of reproducing, turn all your graphics setting except Leader to "High". Scroll around the map to load most of the textures, then click "Next Turn". Try more than once if crash doesn't happen the first time. In this save, Siam happens to make diplo with Rome (I crash before it happens), but given my experience with other crashing saves, the diplo is not the crash cause.

Others affected by Renderer Error are encouraged to download this save and try, as well. We need to know whether the same save has the same effect on all/most affected. Please make sure first your problem isn't caused by overheating. Post your video card model, driver, OS, and anything else you think is important.

Petek said:
Assuming that the faulty code can be identified, would it be possible to create an "unofficial" patch to fix the problem?

Probably not without the support of Firaxis, but it's not out of the question. That was my first approach: to determine what the AI is doing that's crashing, but after exploring the execution of the code, the crash comes far removed from the DLL whose source has been released. If, however, we get enough informative feedback from those affected, we may be able to isolate the condition in the AI's realm that is ultimately causing d3d11 to throw an exception, and then write code in a mod/dll that looks out for that condition and mitigates it before the rest of the game code proceeds.

Petek · Aug 28, 2014

I ran your save with the specified settings, but no crash. Will continue to test several more times. I'm attaching my DxDiag.txt file, perhaps to serve as a baseline for non-crashing systems. Many other DxDiag files were posted in the main Renderer Error thread, and they contain the information that you asked for. A couple of weeks ago I went through these files and extracted the video card make and models, as follows:

The following graphics cards have been installed on systems that experience the renderer error:
NVIDIA GeForce GT 240
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580
NVIDIA GeForce GT 640
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti
NVDIA GeForce GTX 660
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT
ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series
AMD Radeon HD 6570
AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series
Intel(R) HD Graphics Family
Intel(R) HD Graphics 3000

As you can see, most, but not all, of the errors occur with NVIDIA cards. I also recall that the error occurs on all recent Windows systems (XP, 7 and 8). I can go back and extract other information from the DxDiag files, if you think it would be useful to do so.

I don't know of any way to roll back the game to an earlier version.

Aprel · Aug 28, 2014

Thank you. The affected gfx card list and the working dxdiag are a useful reference.

Petek said:
As you can see, most, but not all, of the errors occur with NVIDIA cards. I also recall that the error occurs on all recent Windows systems (XP, 7 and 8). I can go back and extract other information from the DxDiag files, if you think it would be useful to do so.

That won't be necessary at this time. What we really need on this thread is a back-and-forth with people affected, but my biggest concern is I'm late to the punch and most have moved on. I will post instructions on how they can help diagnose the problem (which I had hoped to have up today) tomorrow. Hopefully some will pass through from time to time and eventually we'll have enough feedback to work with.

Sharing saves that crash next turn with Renderer Error, and others affected testing those saves and reporting an identical or different outcome on their systems, is a good way for those to help. For this, setting AutoSave to 1 turn is useful.

Also I might have missed it in the forum, but are some Renderer Error saves already posted in other threads?

Aprel · Aug 29, 2014

@Petek Also as a moderator (sorry, "super mod"

), you have a unique perspective on when a lot of people started coming here with Renderer Error reports. Would you say that the onset was greatest with the release of G&K?

A search reveals a lot of posts across forums with this problems since mid 2012, coinciding with the G&K release.

I have the Complete Edition but turn off the expansions in DLC. Shouldn't matter because under the hood the game picks a different DLL for the game logic depending on the expansion and the base application is the same. But now I wonder if it started with G&K, whether there is something to be gained by forcing the steam settings to only download and install the vanilla version. I wouldn't think the application would be any different, but may be worth a try.

If you haven't bought any DLC/expansions, do you still get updates from Firaxis? Would be interesting to know if (a) everyone gets the same patches, (b) different expansions' patches are managed and distributed separately, or (c) the Vanilla Civ isn't supported and updates are only rolled out to the latest expansions. Not sure, but I would think (a).

Petek · Aug 29, 2014

I don't recall any save files being posted in the main Renderer Error thread. The first post in that thread is dated June 25, 2012 and a patch was released on June 12, 2012. GnK was released on Jun 19, 2012, so that also might be the key date. Currently, all three versions of the game show the same version number (1.0.3.144) at the bottom of the Main Menus. However, I'm pretty sure that patches are version-specific. For example, I think that the Workers stopping work bug still exists in Vanilla, but was fixed for GnK.

Aprel · Aug 29, 2014

Finished adding to the "How To Help" post above.

I wanted to debug the crash that is known to happen at Leaderhead scenes, which I have also experienced, but have kept only one savegame of this and cannot replicate it in that savegame now. Turning off Leaderhead scenes was the first thing I did when I started getting Renderer Error, and I've changed so many graphics settings since then. Would be interesting, tho, to see if those crash in the same part of the code.

Petek said:
I don't recall any save files being posted in the main Renderer Error thread. The first post in that thread is dated June 25, 2012 and a patch was released on June 12, 2012. GnK was released on Jun 19, 2012, so that also might be the key date. Currently, all three versions of the game show the same version number (1.0.3.144) at the bottom of the Main Menus. However, I'm pretty sure that patches are version-specific. For example, I think that the Workers stopping work bug still exists in Vanilla, but was fixed for GnK.

I just tried uninstalling the expansions just in case that had an effect, but the base application (i.e., where all the graphics code is located) is exactly the same, as you expected. Still crashes.

Redaxe · Sep 14, 2014

I'm getting this sporadically now too. Right after I got a new video card installed & a new bigger hard-drive and a reinstall of Civ5. I've just learned to save often but yeah it is frustrating

Aprel · Sep 15, 2014

What video card do you have now, and what did you have before that was working? Post your DxDiag if you have it available. Also, do you mind downloading the savegame in post #8 above (if you have the Babylon DLC) and running that to see if it gives you the Render Error? Give it a couple tries, and scroll around to load the map more before clicking "Next Turn".

Thanks.

Redaxe · Sep 16, 2014

Aprel said:
What video card do you have now, and what did you have before that was working? Post your DxDiag if you have it available. Also, do you mind downloading the savegame in post #8 above (if you have the Babylon DLC) and running that to see if it gives you the Render Error? Give it a couple tries, and scroll around to load the map more before clicking "Next Turn".

Thanks.

I was running an old gigabyte GV N98toc-1gi.
I now have a GTX 750

What happened is my windows became corrupted and wouldn't let me do anything that required administrator approval. Civ 5 also became corrupted for some reason and kept showing in Steam that it was installing an update (which is crazy as Steam was in offline mode at that time - I was waiting for internet to be connected.

My old harddrive of 350Gig also needed replacing so I took the opportunity to get a 1TB harddrive and do a full reinstallation of Windows etc. My PC was choked with dust so I took it down to a servo and used the air pump to blast the dust out. Now unfortunately this blew some water inside and despite air drying the PC under a heater for 3 days it must have damaged something (which turned out to be the old Video card) as I was getting BSoDs.

I took it into a tech shop and they tested the memory including the new hard-drive (I put this in after I dusted the PC off obviously). Anyway the old video card came back with problems so they replaced that.
Now with the new video card and a fresh installation of Civ 5 I'm now getting the occassional renderer error and yes they are most common in the leaderscreen and they seem to decrease in frequency with a lower setting (antialiasing etc off).
But yes I can testify that the old graphics card did not produce this problem and I played hundreds of hours of Civ on it with no problems except that the late game would lag on large maps so I was largely forced to play standard sized maps.

I have taken the PC back to them to stress test it again to see if there is any conflicting problem with the card while its new and under warranty.
When I get it back I'll be happy to do as you ask and I'll report on that.

Aprel · Sep 16, 2014

Thanks. Your unique situation is actually very valuable to getting at this problem, having a working system that began having issues with a new video card install.

As far as I can tell, the GV N98toc-1gi is a Gigabyte rebranding of a nVidia GeForce 9800 GT. That and GTX 750 use the same video driver, which probably rules out the possibility that Render Error is a driver issue alone.

The stock memory clock on the GeForce 9800 GT is very low (900MHz) compared to newer cards, and less than half the clock of my GTX 550 Ti. I've never tried setting the memclock that low, but will have to give it a try. Debugging output has always pointed towards a memory-based error.

While I'm at it, is anyone running Civ5 with a GTX 750 that does not experience the Render Error?

And is anyone running Civ5 with a GV N98toc-1gi / GeForce 9800 GT that does experience the Render Error?

Aprel · Sep 16, 2014

For the record,

Underclocking the memclock on my GTX 550 Ti still yielded a Render Error.

Underclocking the memclock and the GPU clock (which proportionally underclocks the shader clock as well) yielded a generic APPCRASH (c0000005).

I set the memclock to as low as it would go on my GTX 550 Ti, which is 1254 MHz as reported in OpenHardwareMonitor. No luck. Combined that with the lowest GPU setting of 476 MHz, and got an APPCRASH.

It does not appear that the memory clock has anything to do with Render Error.

Aprel · Sep 19, 2014

NVidia just released a new driver for a lot of the video cards that happen to be affected by this issue, but nothing in the Release Notes suggests it will give any improvement to Civ5: nVidia Driver version 344.11 Release Notes (pdf).

That said, nVidia keeps track of a lot of issues over a breadth of games. There's even mention of an anti-aliasing bug in Civ4 on page 24, which it calls out as an application issue.

Anyone know of how we can get nVidia's attention on the Render Error issue? Even if all we get from them is that it's not caused by their driver, that would be progress.

Petek · Sep 19, 2014

I'm not aware that CivFanatics has any formal contacts with nVidia. I did take a look at their forum. Searching for DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED came up with 11 pages of hits. I read the first page and found no mention of Civ 5. Some people reported "fixes" that worked for them (such as changing their Windows theme from Aero to Classic), but I suspect these aren't real fixes. One post contained a link that might have useful information.

Let's Fix "Renderer Error" Once and For All

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