One month after raising a ticket I get a follow-up email from their support system - clearly just a generic email as it asks questions like "Is this internet connection shared with others in the residence: " for a GPU crash - hilarious really
Hi all,
For some time I was getting the GW502 error. It first began while playing the game for some time. Real soon after that it crashed in the home menu after a couple of seconds when the game was just started. I followed this thread and tried all possible solutions that were mentioned. Revert Game ready driver to 436.15 , uninstalled GeForce Exp., lowered the settings and even did a clean install of Windows as a most desperate attempt. Nothing helped.
I noticed that before Gears5.exe crashed I had a display warning saying that the displaydriver nvlddmkm stopped responding and recovered. But I also noticed that before that I was having a lot of disk warnings with errors during a page operation (ID 51). I recently upgrade my SATA SSD for a M2 SSD and come to think of it thats about the time Gears 5 started crashing. So I gonna put my money on that.
I have a MSI Z370 Pro Carbon motherboard and it comes with an M2 SSD heat shield. It turned out to be more of a heat container. I removed the shield, updated the Game Ready driver to 436.48 (latest) and started the game. I maxed out all the settings and did a benchmark…and what do you know…no crash.
I played gears just now for an hour and no crash.
In my case something else was causing the display driver error and eventually crashing Gears. It looks like gears stresses the storage enough to cause paging errors when your storage cant keep up. In my case overheating the M2 SSD degraded performance beyond this threshold. This seemed to do the trick for me.
If you look carefully at the event 51 you will see the disk number does not correspond to a physical disk. If you look in device manager there could be a xvd disk device - this is some sort of virtual disk created for UWP games.
Although Gears 5 is heavy in hardware your SSD disk is NOT being stressed into error
Gears 5 creates hundreds of event 51 every time it starts - this is just another of the many not fixed and not mentioned problems in Gears 5
So in my case I have and SSD, and HDD, I have the game installed into the HDD (I call it Secondary Disk)
My PC is an I7-4790K - 16GB Ram DDR3, Z97-k as a motherboard and GTX 1060 6GB. Now, my system automatically sets the paging file for the SSD with 3000mb, should I put a minimun and maximum manually ? like 16385mb and see if it should work?? Because I haven’t even played 10 hours of the game since it launched and I can’t find any solution, I have other games also, what I don’t want to do is reroll back nvidia drivers… that’s for sure -.-
You’re probably right about the virtual disk created for UWP games. Nevertheless these virtual disks are on actual storage. I think this problem occurs when the responses from the storage take longer than the guest expects to wait.
The point I was trying to make is that the video driver is rather an effect than a cause. In my case removing the shield stopped degrading my storage performance which caused my video driver to stop.
The game doesnt need 16GB of RAM so a 3GB page file on top is fine unless you have some pretty massive background apps as well.
In the old days with just a few GB ram and lots of progs running that were too big for all to fit in physical RAM at the same time then the OS would page out some parts to disk to make room.
There seems to be lots of confusion with paging etc - TC arent helping as they dont acknowledge any PC problems to help anyone.
I just think its easy to see disk error messages and assume it must relate to something physical - its the sort of thing tech support does when you raise a ticket - they scan ,find a message, and blame that telling you to update your drivers rather than fix their stuff.
Lots of people get a large number of event 51 with this game and no other. This is not the characteristic of a hardware problem but of some issue with the way the game is accessing the xvd at startup.
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So i tried the new drivers 440.97 and the game crash with error GW502 after one round of the new deathmatch event. Game was running without this error on driver 436.15
Im really pissed off for pre-order this game as well as GOW 4 back in the day…TC never fixed those damn errors claiming it was Nvidia’s fault… I’m getting tired of uninstalling and test drivers over and over again. sigh…
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I also updated to 440.97 and fortunately everything is still OK. So from what I can tell the driver is fine.
Me toooo everytime there’s a new driver I install to see if this issue is fix nope then I have to revert back to the old ones is so annoying cus most games want the new drivers but yeah I don’t think they will fix chit the pc fam base is lower now then ever do to tc not giveing a fahk about pc port o well time to join those who are leaveing the game and play something els
I fix my issue by installing Nvidia Driver 382.53 the game runs with no problem whatsoever. Keep in mind that by doing this you might not be able to play other games that require the latest drivers. In my case I have i78700k and 1080 Ti ftw gpu and it runs on any other game on the 382.53 drivers. Good luck
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thanks for the tip, fam.
I’ll give this a try because it’s becoming very clear that TC aren’t busy fixing their game at all.
waow, clever.
and JD is a terrible protagonist to play as. paper thin and petty.
I won’t stand for this! JD is my favourite character, he’s petty and paper thin, some of the best qualities a person can have.
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to be fair the entire cast of the “new CoG”, especially in GoW 4, is pretty much paper thing cliche and captain obvious type ■■■■ =]
GoW 5 actually seems way more mature and doesn’t feel like a bad epis…all episodes of F.R.I.E.N.D.S.
So I have gone crash free for a bit now and wanted to share what I changed. I installed aida64 (system stability tester) and before I started the stability test it said that my graphics card timeout setting was too low and would probably cause issues with the test. I thought to myself “hmm… that sounds like why I wanted to run the test”
I updated the timeout value from 2 seconds to 8 seconds. I’m NOT sure that this fixed it, but I have definitely gotten more playtime than usual straight without a crash.
I also followed advice in this thread to lock my framerate at 60.
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He worked for me, thanks buddy. Gtx 1080 ti user.
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Hi I have updated my Nvidia GRD driver, i am using GTX 980 Ti 6 GB. But still facing the same error GW502. Please support…
This issue has been bugging me for days. I even got a new vid card because I thought it was under powered for this (it was a good excuse 
)
The aida64 app found the same issue and offered to fix it. Now I can do the in game benchmark on ultra settings where before it would crash on med.
Good find! Thanks!
New to me Vega 56.
Update, I almost got all the way through Boot Camp… Still crashing. This is dumb.
Another ■■■■■■■ answer from a mediocre studio