Gears Forums

Gears of War 4 (PC) Freezing Solution

#1

Many of us who play GoW4 on PC have suffered the annoying random freezes, however, these bugs are not entirely the fault of TC, but also of Microsoft because Windows 10, especially with the latest updates, does not properly manage the resources for certain games and consequently one or two threads of CPUs are saturated (100%), causing such freezes.

I looked for a thousand ways to limit CPU usage but no program supports GoW4, and that includes BES.
However, in the end I found the solution to this problem and we only have to do this: every time the game is opened, with alt + tab we go back to the desktop and then we go to the task manager. Then we look for the tab “Details” and in the list below we look for the process “GearGame.exe” and right click and select “Set priority” -> “Below normal”.
Finally we just click on “change priority” in the box that appears later and we go back to the game.

With these simple steps (that does not take more than 10 seconds to do it) the freezes are eliminated.
Try it and you will never see a CPU saturation freeze again.
And don’t worry that the performance of the game is not affected at all.

Cheers.

13 Likes
Stuttering mess on PC
No excuse for this
Somebody know how to fix this game?
PC stuttering when match first starts on match
#2

wow, great explanation and instructions. thumbs up to you.

1 Like
#3

I’ll have to play with this.

There was a time way back I was setting priority to Realtime thinking it would prevent crashes by allocating all the juice to the game.

Go figure.

#4

I’m curious to know if this would help with the NVIDIA issues?

#5

I don’t think it will. I’ve never had a crash as he’s described, but I’ve had many Pascal crashes. My GPU never runs near 100% so what he’s describing doesn’t seem in line with the nvidia/Pascal issue.

#6

Gotcha.

I had my doubts but deep down I’m just hoping something fixes it.

1 Like
#7

Thank you for your kind words.
The intention is to help us enjoy this game now that the saga has returned to the PC.
The road has been full of patience, anger and headaches, but this little trick has helped me a lot to solve one of the main problems that afflicts this game.
Here what we try to avoid is that the game does not saturate even a thread of the CPU, which is when the freezes come.

By the way, I don’t have Pascal but I do have an unusual configuration since I use a pair of Kepler (780Ti) in SLI, so I wouldn’t know if this trick solves those problems, but it’s worth trying.
As data I must say that I currently use the Vulkan 399.41 drivers, however I also tried the 416.16 and the results were also satisfactory.
The ones that I recommend not to install are the 416.34.
Those came out quite unstable.

#8

I have the 416.16 driver and I change the priority thing yesterday and was able to play through a full game of monster mash without it crashing but I did the priority thing again today and it literally froze before they even set the fabricator down…

#9

I was going to gave up on Gears 4, I just hope this works, thanks.

2 Likes
#10

NVIDIA%20SETTINGS%201 NVIDIA%20SETTINGS%202 NVIDIA%20SETTINGS%203

GOW4%20SETTINGS%201
GOW4 SETTINGS 1.JPG1350Ă—768 79.7 KB
GOW%204%20SETTINGS%202
GOW 4 SETTINGS 2.JPG1320Ă—698 54.4 KB

I run the game on above settings. Please ignore the resolution in game as it is a screenshot when in windowed mode. i run at 1080p full screen. I find that the above setting s keep my game from crashing. I stream on twitch as well with these settings and the game runs fine. I hope this would help.

Ambient occlusion setting in the nvidia control panel has major impact on crashes as I have observed. vsync and async compute also I keep turned off.

I have a gtx1060 6gb oc

3 Likes
#11

GTX 1080TI in SLI

I’ll give this a try

#12

does this game even support sli?

#13

Pretty sure it does. Last I remember it does.

#14

So far it seems to work. I noticed when ever I get a message from the windows xbox app my screen goes black for a split second. But I’d take that over the game being broken any day of the week.

Hopefully it stays fixed. Good Job OP! you managed to do something a billion dollar franchise couldn’t fix.

Do I have to do this every time I launch the game?

2 Likes
#15

@BreaklessBiker: Thank you, any suggestion is welcome.

@EVGA_SLI: Of course I do. I have a pair of 780Ti that work perfectly in sync with this game.
It’s something I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by since I started playing it, and I hope GoW5 has the same support for SLI.

@Rundan: That’s right, you have to repeat the steps every time you enter the game.
I have looked for a tool that performs the process automatically, but none does, but that does not mean a problem because with practice we can do it in 5 seconds, or less.

#16

how well does it run on the 780ti?

i played it on my 970 for a while and had to upgrade to a 10 series for 4k because i got spoiled by the xbox one x playing gears in 4k

#17

I bought this game when I had already mounted the SLI so I have not tried a single card, but I can say that together both cards allow me to play at maximum quality (except the DoF that I have set in ultra and not in insane) in 4K and 60fps stable.

It also helps that both (Gigabyte 780 Ti WindForce 3X OC) come with OC from the factory.

#18

dont work for me… i have 970gtx

#19

GTX 1080TI in SLI
And so far I’m not seeing any issues

#20

It doesn´t work in my PC.:frowning: