» Fri Nov 27, 2015 9:17 am This is a repost from the reddit technical support thread which I'm putting it here in case anyone else is running into similar issues. The details may help narrow down the problem and identify the area Bethesda need to examine.
The fix for this was to replace the graphics card. Quite a drastic fix, but it's how this particular problem was resolved. No other magic spells or incantations could resolve this issue and it's system agnostic, so tied to the hardware itself. Without a specific, targeted fix from Bethesda/AMD, it is, as far as I can see, the only guaranteed solution to this particular issue.
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Here's what has been happening to me and here's my (sort-of) fix:
My specs: Windows 10 (latest technical build), 16gb ram, i5 4690k (factory), Samsung EVO 250 SSD, XFX R9 290DD. All drivers up to date and using, at some point, every driver version from 15.5 to 15.11.
I have been getting the "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" error which crashes my game out whenever I look at anything with a lot of geometry(?). This means I haven't been able to progress past the opening as whenever I look at the door, or go near the crib, my game blows up.
I tried every fix under the sun and replaced my graphics drivers many times over, but to no avail. I moved it to another hard-drive in case it was suffering from the EVO issue I've read, but it had no effect. I decided to start treating it like a proper test case and booted up Fallout 4 on my girlfriends Windows 8.1, R9 280 machine to get a control. The game ran perfectly.
I took out the R9 280 from her machine and swapped it with the 290 in my machine and, leaving everything else identical, booted up the game on my machine. The game worked flawlessly. This narrowed the issue down to the graphics card. I then put my 290 in her machine, leaving everything else identical and the game crashed in the exact same spot on her machine.
With everything else different, the card crashed in the same place. Obviously this means that the problem is due to some hardware configuration specific to the R9 290. Because others using this card have reported few problems (though some have had poor performance), I'm left to assume it's some particular XFX configuration. The card isn't factory overclocked (it is not the black edition), and I clocked the card down with Afterburner to check anyway - it made no difference.
I was initially suspicious that there was something wrong with the card, but every other stress test and benchmark showed no issues. In a real-world scenario, the XFX card has been absolutely flawless in every other game - 120+ hours into MGSV, hundreds of hours into Guild Wars 2, DotA 2, Witcher 3 etc. etc. It has been genuinely flawless until Fallout 4, and remains flawless in every other game. Something about the Fallout 4 engine just doesn't play well. Amusingly, the card runs Skyrim spectacularly. Temps are low across the board, even under load (the DD is a great cooler) and a 750w PSU provides it more than enough power to handle everything I can throw at it.
This might be something that can be fixed in a driver, or game update. Either way, for anyone else getting this crash error, it could be your exact card. Hopefully this is something that can be resolved before my girlfriend gets too attached to the better graphics on The Sims and won't give me back my card!
The net result of all of this is that this driver/game failure seems to be because of an edge case setup, but as the XFX R9 290DD is a popular and well reviewed card, I would hope that Bethesda take a look at what is causing driver failure on this board.
