Acer Nitro 5 AN515-57 screen freezing, forced shutdown needed

I got an Acer Nitro 5 about 9 months ago. Config: i5 11400h, GTX 1650, 16gb of RAM, SSD ADATA 512GB NVMe. I always used for work, but now that I'm a long trip, I decided to try a game, a very light one, Jagged Alliance Back in Action on Steam.

In more os less 40 minutes of gameplay, the game freezes, just the music keep playing. A few minutes later the mouse starts to respond again, but the screen is all black, except by the mouse pointer. No command works, ALT+F4, CTRL+ALT+DEL... I have to make a forced shutdown holding the power button. This happens all the time.

First I thought it was about overheating, I installed NitroSense I started to play with coolers at maximum speed. Didn't work. On Windows Event Log I got some errors related to memory allocation, I tried to set start virtual memory to 1.5x (24gb), tried to disabled virtual memory, same behaviour.

Then I realized that my integrated graphics have 8gb (50%) of shared memory, while GTX also have 8gb (50%), they could basically use 100%? There is no way to reduce this amount, I researched a lot. For last I found another possible cause, Nvidia Optimus. I found a page teaching to disabled for all laptop models, for Acer they recommend to use PredatorSense, which I can't use because I have a Nitro model.

I'm not a novice user, I've already run every type of diagnostic possible, updated all the drivers, I made a lot of combinations on Nvidia control panel... There is no way to disable integrated gpu on bios, I tried on device manager, seems like both gpus stopped working this way. Than I tried to disable nvidia card only (integrated gpu can handle this game) it seemed that I had it solved, but about a fews minutes ago the problem returned.

It is my first Acer and I'm having a very bad experience. What I'm missing?

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Puraw

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/693193/acer-nitro-5-an515-57-screen-freezing-forced-shutdown-needed

Check your memory in Windows11, see if other games freeze, if you are playing offline and other apps freeze too, boot in Safe Mode.

Try to play these games in Safe Mode, if no freezing you have a GPU driver issue, uninstall the display drivers in Safe Mode with DDU and reboot to Windows. Check in Task Manager Processes tab what other programs use a lot of resources, either disable some or change their priority in Efficiency mode (only works for current session). Don't use 3rd-party AV programs like AVAST and uninstall Ccleaner, trial versions and all bloatware. Avoid running several browsers, use only Edge in Window11. Refresh your system image with DISM online and repair system files:
Open Command Prompt as administrator go online and paste this line:
Dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth press Enter, should complete.
Then enter this line in the same Command Prompt: SFC /scannow press Enter. Repeat after files have been repaired till you see "Found no integrity violations"

BrunoCzar

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1235079#Comment_1235079

Thank you, Puraw. I'm still using windows 10 that came installed in the laptop, I used windows memory diagnostic and also 10 loops with QuickMemoryTestOk 4.67, no erros detected.

Out of curiosity I tried to start the game in Safe Mode, it doesn't load at all, I think it depends on other services that haven't been loaded.

I used SFC /scannow before, the output said that was some damaged files that were restored, but the problem is still the same. I repetead right now, it said no integrity violations.

I close all programs before I open the game, except my AV, I use Kaspersky.

Alejandro_AC

Hi @BrunoCzar this thread is very old but they already raised problems with Windows 10, that may be the problem, it is a game designed for previous versions of Windows and the current processors, graphics and memories exceed the reaction times of the game, but it is just my theory , I can be wrong:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/57740/discussions/0/142261027575942575/

Thank you.
All the best.

BrunoCzar

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1235131#Comment_1235131

Hi Alejandro, I found this problem in other topics, but their problem is usually on the intro video, some users solved by removing the video. But in my case, the video plays fine, the game freezes during the gameplay at random moments. Sometimes after 40min, sometimes after 1 hour. This game doesn't have cutscenes.

My feeling is that the game runs using geforce card, and another background program starts to run and uses the integrated graphics, the system can't handle the gpu swap properly, and crashes, but I can't guarantee that.