FFXI Random Crash To Desktop

After a 6 month or so break from game I'm back but have ran into some issues upon return. I started my break right before the May update which adjusted the UI in game and caused some issues with existing dat mods. I believe I solved all of those issues through some trouble shooting and downloading the newest dat mods after the update. The issue I have now is random crash to desktop which can happen on any one of my 6 accounts. I have the windows event viewer dump and I'm hoping someone much smarter than I could provide insight on what this could possibly be.

General info:
Nvidia RTX 3080
Driver version 566.14
12 Gen Core i9-12900K
64 GB Ram
Windows 10
Dgvoodoo2 (VRAM set to only 256)

XIView 2.0, using latest from here:
https://github.com/KenshiDRK/XiView

Using XI Pivot on one character, but not the rest. For kicks I ran XI without XI Pivot on my main and still receive the same crash. I assume I can rule this out.

Here's two separate dumps that occurred very close time wise together.

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
<Provider Name="Application Error" />
<EventID Qualifiers="0">1000</EventID>
<Version>0</Version>
<Level>2</Level>
<Task>100</Task>
<Opcode>0</Opcode>
<Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2024-11-21T17:31:17.5441835Z" />
<EventRecordID>52460</EventRecordID>
<Correlation />
<Execution ProcessID="0" ThreadID="0" />
<Channel>Application</Channel>
<Computer>DESKTOP-QPQ18C5</Computer>
<Security />
</System>
- <EventData>
<Data>pol.exe</Data>
<Data>1.18.13.0</Data>
<Data>4e3bcddc</Data>
<Data>KERNELBASE.dll</Data>
<Data>10.0.19041.5131</Data>
<Data>082fad93</Data>
<Data>c0000005</Data>
<Data>0014623c</Data>
<Data>67c0</Data>
<Data>01db3c2f5d4fde3a</Data>
<Data>C:\Program Files (x86)\PlayOnline\SquareEnix\PlayOnlineViewer\pol.exe</Data>
<Data>C:\WINDOWS\System32\KERNELBASE.dll</Data>
<Data>ab7ab714-a62e-4046-9fda-09a3388831ea</Data>
<Data />
<Data />
</EventData>
</Event>

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
<Provider Name="Application Error" />
<EventID Qualifiers="0">1000</EventID>
<Version>0</Version>
<Level>2</Level>
<Task>100</Task>
<Opcode>0</Opcode>
<Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2024-11-21T17:44:50.7464288Z" />
<EventRecordID>52464</EventRecordID>
<Correlation />
<Execution ProcessID="0" ThreadID="0" />
<Channel>Application</Channel>
<Computer>DESKTOP-QPQ18C5</Computer>
<Security />
</System>
- <EventData>
<Data>pol.exe</Data>
<Data>1.18.13.0</Data>
<Data>4e3bcddc</Data>
<Data>KERNELBASE.dll</Data>
<Data>10.0.19041.5131</Data>
<Data>082fad93</Data>
<Data>c0000005</Data>
<Data>0014623c</Data>
<Data>6428</Data>
<Data>01db3c2fbb649f8a</Data>
<Data>C:\Program Files (x86)\PlayOnline\SquareEnix\PlayOnlineViewer\pol.exe</Data>
<Data>C:\WINDOWS\System32\KERNELBASE.dll</Data>
<Data>fbe6545d-c83a-46a3-b279-21ca55db2ffd</Data>
<Data />
<Data />
</EventData>
</Event>

Any help would be greatly appreciated. One last thing to mention, I do seem to be having an issue with going from POL to FFXI, the borderless window FFXI screen will load black and then hang up with the blue mouse wheel spinning for roughly 35 seconds. Then it will resume as normal. This happens on all six accounts. I ran Thorny's ram patch and that oddly enough fixed it for the next log in cycle, but after last night maintenance it's back again this morning.

For me the only fix that resolved game crashes very similar to yours (started approx. in july2024) was replacing motherboard , main SSD drive and reinstalling windows. Kept everything else including processor and GPU. Since it was covered by my Lenovo warranty i only lost time. Game runs smoth again. 6 characters take about 15% CPU and 35-50% GPU resources. Still cant figure out what exactly made it crash hardware of software...

Event viewer logs are hard to look at in that format. You may also need to consider the surrounding events in the log. There's also the chance there is no relevant data and the issue is occurring internally.

The guy above I would have pointed at ram or a bad system file.

Didn't the patch have to be applied anytime there was pol.exe change?

notice the card you have: Nvidia RTX 3080
why do you have vram set so low? you have plenty on that card.

was it a typo? 256 is really low.

if it wasn't you should increase that to the highest value you can manage when using 6 accounts, 2048 probably

This is bad, it's likely to break if you do this.

VRAM value is what dgVoodoo2 reports to the game during DX initialization, if that value is too small it will cause issues, if it's larger then 2GB it can also cause issues. Set it to 2048MB and leave it alone.

Thanks for all the feedback!


Yikes. Did you do it all at once or did you strategically do it like reinstalling windows, then SSD, then Mobo? Or all at once? I feel like I may have to go this route. My PC runs similar to yours resource wise 6 box.


I tried a ffxi file check and ran everything dat wise vanilla, but I still had a CTD at 4am this morning. And yea, the RAM patch has to be run every time there's a file check I believe.





I actually did run at 256 MB since that was the default setting lol. Oddly enough back in April of this year I was running the game like this with no issues. I believe I have 10 GB of ram on this GPU so I went ahead and upped it to 1056 MB. If I full time 6 box would running at 2048MB cause issues potentially since 2048 x6 = 12,288MB which exceeds my 10GB?

One item I did think of was packetflow. I just saw my settings run this at all times and not only in instances. Sounds like a reach, but could that cause issues?

I think I'll just need to reinstall FFXI and see if that fixes it, after that maybe windows. For the reinstall of FFXI, the POL download files are ok? I saw something about the steam install being "better" for some reason but it could have been an old post.

So that value isn't how much dgVoodoo2 eats immediately, it's how much it reports is "available" to be eaten. While FFXI was indeed designed to run on very small amounts of GPU memory, it was also designed to run at 640x480 30FPS and tiny texture sizes. Modern systems are able to run it at much higher quality, and modern Windower takes advantage of this and lets you set higher resolutions and use higher quality textures from mods. Translating from DX8 to DX11 also incurs an increase in memory overhead as DX11 uses more buffers / caches.

When you put all that together you get much higher memory usage then vanilla FFXI. If you are running a bunch of really tiny windows with no texture swaps, then 512MB is fine. If running larger resolutions then 1024MB, and if running a full screen 2560x1440p or 3840x2160 then you definitely want 2GB.

You can actually go higher then 2GB, but you need to use the LargeAddressAware mod for that.

Thanks for the info, I went ahead and changed it to 2GB.

As an update, I tried reinstalling FFXI but ran into the same issues. I ended up reinstalling windows 10 completely and so far it appears the crash to desktop issue has been resolved.