Drivers & Software

[KenTWOu]

I had Win 10, i5 3570K, 12GB DDR3 RAM, ASRock RX6600 Challenger D 8GB VRAM, FSP 500W Blue Storm 2 PSU

Since last December I have Win 10, Ryzen R5 3600, 16GB DDR4 RAM, RX6600 8GB VRAM, XPG Pylon 750W PSU

I'm playing Watch Dogs Legion online on almost a daily basis. DX11 works great, on i5 it was like one crash a week, mostly because I didn't close some background apps, so 12GB of slow RAM was basically an issue. The fact that the game utilized almost 100% of 4 core CPU didn't help either. On Ryzen it crashes like once a month, usually when something really weird happens online: bad ping to the host, lots of crazy stuff at the same time, etc. The game is stable during like 6 hours long sessions, even if I did tons of different activities: all kinds of missions, the less stable ones, more CPU/GPU hungry ones, etc.

But as soon as I switch to DX12 it crashes once a day, may be even twice. On i5 it might crash when you open a map, scan an NPC, switch to another operative or just after opening a main menu. Sometimes it freezes and you can still hear sound. And it still crashes in DX12 mode on Ryzen. The system is more powerful, so it happens a bit differently, but still it mostly just random freezes, crashes not tied to anything. It might happen within 2 hours of online, it might happen after 20 minutes. It's completely random.

But a guaranteed way to crash the game way faster (or test for stability) in DX12 mode is to try to play a co-op missions playlist consisted of 8 missions starting with Dysfunction. For some reason the game crashes more often during them. Here's a screenshot showing playlist icon on the map and another one with playlist menu opened:

Spoiler

coop icon on the mapcoop missions playlist opened

I have 1280x1024 monitor, I'm playing the game using 1280x720 resolution, mostly high settings, 60 fps cap and Vsync. I have 60% GPU and 60% CPU peak utilization. So temperatures are very low, PSU is more than enough, it's not even hot like a previous one, RAM is more than enough as well. The game is stable in DX11 mode. May be even relatively stable in single player in DX12 with ray tracing enabled (although I didn't try to play through entire campaign again, just free roaming, so can't confirm stability during 6 hours long sessions). It just crashes a lot in DX12 mode online.

The only difference I see between renderers besides speed and ray tracing ofc is DX12 renderer has very famous corrupted operatives pics bug (see the screenshot below:

Spoiler

operatives pics corruption

Pics get corrupted if you enter online free roam too fast. If you click online menu and stay in initial online lobby (the one with current season number, London free roam, Project OMNI, Invasion buttons) the game will generate pics in background and they will be fine. The game would crash after that anyway. But may be it's somehow related, may be it causes some memory leak or something, i don't know.

And of course, Ubisoft Connect launcher behaves slightly different when the game is launched in DX12. When you make a screenshot you might capture Ubi Connect overlay messages. So may be that's somehow related as well.

Below I just described my current in-game graphics options (ofc I tried to change every setting, it didn't help):

Spoiler

Window mode - Fullscreen

Resolution - 1280x720

Monitor Refresh Rate - Auto

V-Sync - Normal

FPS Limit - 60

Field of View - 70

DirectX - 12

Graphics Quality - Custom

Geometry - High

Environment - High

Texture Resolution - Medium

Texture Filtering - Ultra

Shadows - Low

Headlight Shadows - 2 cars

Reflections - Very High

Motion Blur - Off

Bloom - On

Post-Processing - TAA

Subsurface Scattering - High

Ray Traced Reflections - Off

Temporal Upscaling - 100%

Image Sharpness - 15%

I tried different drivers, 22.5.2, 22.11.2, 23.3.2 to name a few, I have default driver settings, so Surface Format Optimization is enabled, Tesselation is AMD optimized.

So after months of tweaks and changes I still didn't find a way how to make this game stable in DX12 mode, I tried everything except clear OS install. This is the only game I have problems with. I hoped that the recent Steam release would bring more players and someone would find a way how to make DX12 stable on AMD hardware, or even Valve/Steam Deck community will find something, but it didn't help. I created this thread in case someone else struggles with the same issue.

P.S: before anyone says it's AMD fault, my friends with Nvidia cards experience crashes online in DX12 mode. Unfortunately, I couldn't convince them to try DX11, despite I didn't have crashes for month.

[KenTWOu]

This video demonstrates how to force the game to freeze and then crash relatively fast in online mode on PC. It proves that there is some kind of memory leak in DX12 renderer only.

Basically what I did is I scanned people, pressed O to open social menu, switched server to public and then to friends only to restart it, run to the same people, scanned them, etc... repeated all actions over and over until the game freezed and crashed.

Using this way it takes the game to crash from 8 to 40 minutes. I still don't know what it depends upon. I tried to enable/disable TONS OF THINGS. I think it's completely random. It doesn't depend on drivers, graphical settings or ray tracing. It happens on the lowest gfx settings as well. The game doesn't crash only when DX11is enabled.

As described above the same memory leaks happen during normal online gameplay, it's just really hard to demonstrate/capture them, cause they're so random. Might happen after 8 min, after 1, 2 hours and even after a longer playtime.

A very important note: to me it looks like the game just freezes, so instead of that green screen at 9:46 I just see the last gameplay frame. can hear the game sounds, and then the game crashes to desktop. Also sometimes these freezes/crashes happen at the very end of loading screens. sometimes when you scan someone, open a main menu, or a map. The game behaved this way in DX12 as long as I remember. It's just I finally found the way how to consistently demonstrate that.

[KenTWOu]

One more thing, I had MBR disk, so couldn't enable UEFI BIOS and SAM/rebar. About two weeks ago I converted my disk to GPT, enabled UEFI/SAM/rebar, enabled SAM in AMD drivers. The game's performing way faster now: Very High preset with ray tracing works faster than High preset with ray tracing without SAM, and the game uses 1GB less RAM. The game still freezes/crashes, so it's not related to SAM or anything.

[xxrune]

I think the only thing you can do is send a bug report through the bug report tool or through this link: https://www.amd.com/en/support/contact-email-form to let them know that it's not just a few people having black screen issues or other issues after recent driver updates.

BTW, I crash on all games with my PowerColor Radeon RX 7900 XTX Red Devil.

[KenTWOu]

During a year I've sent 5 bug reports regarding random freezes/crashes in the game. I did it each time I updated either my hardware or my drivers, which doesn't happen that often. The last 2 reports had links to this thread.

I just don't know if there is any point to do it. The game isn't that popular, so probably isn't high priority for them, and Ubisoft themselves stopped supporting the game anyway. Even on Nvidia hardware It's still has technical issues beside this one: it crashes under certain circumstances when ray tracing is enabled.

Thanks for suggestion anyway.

[KenTWOu]

So I did clean install of Win 10 Pro x64 22H2 on an old spare HDD I have, installed 23.5.1 AMD drivers and nothing else, installed Ubisoft Connect client and verified the game files, 2 VC x64 packages were installed (the latest 14.29.30133 (2019) by AMD Adrenalin driver suite and 11.0.61030 (2012) by the game). Win 10 used default settings mostly. The game used default settings mostly: DX12, high preset, no Vsync, no fps limit. I started to do my online stability test shown in the youtube video above. The game freezed/crashed after ~12 minutes.

[KenTWOu]

Just for fun tried this very neat Ultra Low settings mod when DX12 is enabled, the game still crashes:

https://www.nexusmods.com/watchdogslegion/mods/46

[KenTWOu · Accepted solution]

The only thing I found that made DX12 crashes significantly less frequent is applying famous Watch Dogs 2 workaround for AMD cards to Legion:

1) Open the game config folder %USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Games\Watch Dogs Legion\
2) Open the game config file WD3_GamerProfile.xml

3) Find DeferredFxQuality="console" parameter and change it to DeferredFxQuality="pc"

4) Save changes, close the file.

P.S: I'm tired of testing the game for DX12 stability, so may be it's a placebo or it didn't help or something else affected the game stability like Ubisoft Connect updates. So just in case, right now I have 24.7.1 driver, Win 10 Home 22H2, build 19045.4651, my current resolution is 1080p, I'm playing the game with HDR enabled, V-Sync Off, FreeSync ON, SAM is disabled.

P.P.S: Don't use this workaround if you're playing the game using DX11 renderer, first of all, based on my experience you don't need it for DX11, second, it might make the game less stable in DX11 mode.