GTAV has stopped working

[Palerion]

My apologies for the lack of creativity in the title, but this specific issue has been baffling me for a couple of days now. First off, my specs:

 

GPU: GTX 970

CPU: i5 3570k

OS: Windows 10 Home Edition (creator's update; this may be important, I'm not sure)

Hard Drive: 1TB SSD

Platform: Steam

 

Now, onto my issue. The game simply stops responding at some point and I get the classic "GTAV has stopped working" error. Normally when something like this happens I can get to the bottom of it rather quickly, but this issue is different.

 

I've done a significant amount of troubleshooting already.

1. At first, I chalked it up as a hardware issue. I pulled up some monitors and saw that my CPU usage would stay around 100%, while my GPU was performing perfectly fine, having plenty of VRAM remaining and running at cool temps. Both the CPU and GPU, however, are running at low temps; the mid-60's and 50's, respectively. I spent a lot of time trying to reduce the stress on my CPU, then eventually realized that this may not be the problem. I turned down extended distance scaling, population density, variety, etc, still got crashes. Furthermore, I've had crashes when both my CPU and GPU are at 80% load or below with perfectly fine temps. AND my game runs buttery smooth. I can turn the graphics settings up very high and ultra, with 4x MSAA and FXAA enabled and all the scaling options turned all the way up, and the game performs exceptionally. It's beautiful and void of stutters, significant frame dips, or anything that would lead me to believe that my system isn't capable of handling the graphics. After this bit of troubleshooting, I'm led to believe that whatever I'm dealing with may not be a hardware issue at all.

2. Secondly, I haven't played GTAV in quite a few months. The last time I played it was prior to Windows 10's Creators Update. After some research, I discovered that this update may have caused some issues. The culprit, according to many, was the new "Game Mode" which can be found in windows settings. So, I disabled it. Disabled the game bar and everything associated with game mode. When I returned to GTAV, I did see a noticable improvement in performance, but, to my dismay, the crashes still occurred.

3. I have verified the integrity of the game cache via Steam. No issues were found. At this moment I am re-installing the game in hopes that maybe, somehow, that will fix the issue, but I'm afraid that if verifying the integrity of the game cache didn't do the trick, neither will a re-install. Fingers crossed though!

4. I've updated and re-installed my graphics drivers. No dice.

5. I have found and tried quite a few weird fixes on the internetall of which have failed to fix my problem. I've tried running GTAV and the launcher in compatibility mode for windows 7 as administrator. I've tried copying the d3d9.dll file from System 32 into the game directory. And yes, I have watched task manager as the game has run and while the game is not running and checked for processes that may be interfering or hogging processing power. I found nothing unusual.

 

So, that's what I've got so far guys. I would love any help that you're willing to offer. I think the main takeaway for me, and the lead that I'm following as I further pursue this issue, is the fact that this game ran fine for me for a LONG time. I stopped playing around the end of 2016 or beginning of 2017, having hardly experienced a crash for the entire year or so that I had had the game, and once I returned, the game crashes at random points, seemingly indiscriminate of the stress being put on my hardware. Sometimes it crashes on the loading screen. Sometimes it crashes while I'm driving or flying, sometimes 2 minutes after I've entered the game world, sometimes 10 minutes after I've entered the game world, and sometimes right after I respawn. With some luck the re-install will magically fix my issue, but until then, if you guys have any insight at all, I would greatly appreciate it!

[HalfOfAKebab]

Check my post out here: https://www.reddit.com/r/HalfOfAKebab/comments/68alq8/better_than_rockstar_support_t3/. Some of those fixes may be of use.

[Palerion]

I can confirm that the reinstall did not fix the issue. I'll keep trying out the other fixes mentioned, but it's seeming quite ridiculous at this point; feels like I'll never find a fix, this doesn't even begin to make sense. And yes, as you said, it is "blood boiling, bone-crushing, skin-tearing" levels of frustrating. This most recent crash (after the reinstall), CPU was at 91% usage, 78 deg (i overclocked to try and fix the problem), GPU was at 49%, 62 deg, and 3,503 MB of memory had been used

[Palerion]

@HalfOfAKebab I can't thank you enough for compiling that list man. I hope this thread can help someone else having the same issue as me; fix #13 on the list (deleting settings.xtm, cfg.dat, and pc_settings.bin from the GTAV directory) did the trick! I was afraid that this fix would be meaningless since I had already reinstalled the game, but I failed to realize that the GTAV folder located in documents was not affected by the reinstall. I assume that, over the course of the updates to GTAV, one of the files in that directory was corrupted. Once again, thank you so much, and I sincerely hope these fixes continue to help people having this problem, because the various possible causes have made this one of the most frustrating cases of program crashing that I have ever dealt with.