DX11 Initilization Failed after updating drivers as noted in CIV BE

[shinzu1]

Hello,

I recently bought SM civilization beyond earth. After starting that game (it loaded, startup movie was nice) and entering the starting screen, there at the bottom was a small red message that told me my drivers were not up to date and that BE was not tested with my current drivers. Therefore, I exited the game and updated my drivers, which I last did quite some time ago.
I have an AMD graphcard, so I used the old catalyst program to search for drivers and DLed and installed the amd-catalyst-14-9-win7-win8.1-64bit-dd-ccc-whql.exe from http://www2.ati.com/drivers/amd-catalyst-14-9-win7-win8.1-64bit-dd-ccc-whql.exe

After updating in this way, Beyond Earth and other games are broken, seemingly because DX11 is not starting anymore. The following error message occurs when starting Beyond Earth: DX11 Initilization Failed
"The DX11 renderer failed to start. Please ensure that your system possesses a suitable graphics device with properly configured drivers."

CIV5 with DX11 seem to begin (short blackness of the screen after selecting Dx11 to start it up), but throws me out directly after that without error message, before the introvideo.
The DX9 version of CIV5 works through the opening cinematics, but drops just before the opening menu.

I proceeded to check and update some minor windows things, but this did not change the situation. According to windows DX11 is working perfectly and I cannot adjust it or DL/reinstall.

Ive done clean installs of the AMD drivers as suggested in AMD forum and posted there awell, this did not fix the problem.
Ive de-installed and reinstalled CIV: BE which did not fix the problem.

Saw a post here by someone who has a similar problem with a different graph card, perhaps the problem does not lie with the driver change?

Attachment: dxdiag.

 

[Petek]

Welcome to CivFanatics!

Thanks for posting your DxDiag file. My system also has a AMD Radeon HD 5800 Series video card and I'm running exactly the same driver. I have no problem starting the game. I noticed that your screen resolution is 1920x1200 whereas mine is 1920x1080. It seems unlikely that this is causing a problem, but can you change your resolution to 1920x1080 and check if that helps? Please post again if not.

 

[darkskies]

A long shot but try installing a driver one version older than the newest one. If that doesn't work, go ahead and reinstall the newest one again.

 

[Joch]

Hi, were you trying to install the 14.9 or the 14.9.2 BETA drivers?

I played BE with the 14.9 drivers over the weekend (R9 290) with no issues, DX11 or Mantle. When I downloaded and installed the 14.9.2 BETA, I received the same message you have and reverted back to 14.9.

It turns out the 14.9 is an integrated driver for both Win 7/8.1/32bit/64bit while the 14.9.2 BETA has 4 separate versions, i.e. Win 7 or 8.1, 32 or 64 bit version. When you let the AMD site pick, it will spit out the 64 bit Win 8.1 driver, which of course does not work on a Win 7 system. You have the pick the link: "Latest Windows Beta Driver" and then pick the right version for your system.

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDCatalyst14-9-2BetaWINReleaseNotes.aspx

 

[shinzu1]

Been away for a few days and did a complete redo of steps to recheck. Again no results on reinstalling the AMD drivers.

Welcome to CivFanatics!

Thanks for posting your DxDiag file. My system also has a AMD Radeon HD 5800 Series video card and I'm running exactly the same driver. I have no problem starting the game. I noticed that your screen resolution is 1920x1200 whereas mine is 1920x1080. It seems unlikely that this is causing a problem, but can you change your resolution to 1920x1080 and check if that helps? Please post again if not.

Thanks for your post. Several different resolutions, including yours did not solve the problem.

Darkskies, thanks for your post. Ive tried the last 13.x option. This did not work.

Sadly, I do not have a system recovery point for the driver from before I did the "driver upgrade"

Joch, thanks for your post. Ive tried clean installs with both and an older version. No sigar.

 

[shinzu1]

Update.

Reinstalled a few slightly older games.

These do work!

DOTA2 and Xcom EU/EW work just fine. Im thinking these would also use directx11, so it has got to do with the interaction with CIV 5/BE.

I really dont want to do a windows+everything reinstall~~

 

[darkskies]

Been away for a few days and did a complete redo of steps to recheck. Again no results on reinstalling the AMD drivers.



Thanks for your post. Several different resolutions, including yours did not solve the problem.

Darkskies, thanks for your post. Ive tried the last 13.x option. This did not work.

Sadly, I do not have a system recovery point for the driver from before I did the "driver upgrade"

Joch, thanks for your post. Ive tried clean installs with both and an older version. No sigar.

What about 14.4 which is more current than 13.x but before being optimized for BE and you did try the 14.9.2 beta right?

 

[shinzu1]

Tried 14.4 aswell without result.
14.9.2 beta was tried before.

Latest DxDiag as attachment.

 

[darkskies]

Well if you want to try another really long shot, see if there have been any BIOS updates for your system, while I normally wouldn't think they would effect the DX11 implementation your BIOS does interact with the graphics card and I've seen some stranger things before (i.e. something in the BIOS that was blocking something from being implemented but was fixed later...and alas fixes like this have a tendency to not be documented so the only way to be truly sure it to install the update). If there is a newer BIOS follow the instructions exactly for the upgrade and remember there is always a slight risk of bricking your system with a BIOS upgrade (rare but it occasionally can happen) on laptops be sure the battery is fully charged on desktops I recommend being plugged into an uninterruptable power supply before updating the BIOS as this eliminates the risk of a power interruption during the process. I'd also recommend checking if there are any other driver updates such as for the sound system and installing them too.
First go back to the most recent graphics driver though.

Ultimately though I think it's going to come down to whether Firaxis figures out what is going on and fixes it.

 

[shinzu1]

Did a clean install of windows(and of the drivers and of the game, which included dx11). Didnt seem to fix it, the game just didnt boot at all, reverted back to starting popup with amd or normal startup options. No divx11 error showed up this time though. (CIV 5 didnt work either)
Then cleaned and installed old drivers from long ago I found in the recesses of my PC (10-8_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_enu, I assumed these were the drivers I had before), this didnt work, updated to the new drivers without removing the old ones. Didnt work. But CIV5 somehow worked again.
Reinstalled BE again and this time it works.

I was basicly trying out whatever I could in the waiting time to a response from 2kgames, I have no idea how any of that should have made a change in the interaction of the game with the various drivers. But I have a functioning game now.

Thanks for the attempts to help!

 

[finminer]

I was having no problems with Civ V or Beyond Earth, but as I was doing some maintenance this morning, I installed new drivers for my NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580. Now I am getting the "DX11 Renderer failed to initialize" error and Civ 5 won't run on any DX version. DXDiag attached.

 

[finminer]

I rolled back my NVIDIA graphics driver and both games now work fine. Apparently they do not like the 7/2/14 version 9.18.13.4052.

 

[Miggelito]

I have the same problem. First day after installation the game worked fine, but the suddenly i started getting the error ''The DX11 renderer failed to start....''. I did'nt update any drivers before i got the error. But i changed the driver of my graphics card to an older one, that specifically named civ:be to work on it. I also tried to reinstall the game twice, but nothing.. I'd be greatfull for some help! dxdiag attached!
thanks
View attachment DxDiag.txt