[ANSWERED] Fix to Forza Horizon 4 Crashing Constantly - PC - Random Crashes

Troubleshooting Hub Legacy Troubleshooting FH4 Troubleshooting
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Hello all,

Background
I’ve had issues since the demo, and I’ve had issues since the game launched day 1 and it always seemed random. The most I’ve ever played without a crash on PC, until now, was about an hour and a half on a fresh start while only opening up the game. No chrome, firefox, discord, nothing. I’ve done everything all the other forums have said to do in some type of order below so if my solution relies on these as well I’d like you to at least take a look:

  • https://support.forzamotorsport.net/hc/en-us/articles/360007593074-My-Game-is-Not-Launching-or-is-Crashing-on-PC
  • https://forums.forza.net/turn10_postst133057_Forza-Horizon-4-crashing---a-lot.aspx?=
  • I have both Windows and Nvidia Screen overlays disables
  • I have reinstalled the game while making sure my computer didn’t fall asleep during the installation
  • I have terminated and reset my game multiple times
  • My game can run as a background App and I don’t allow it to access my mic
  • I don’t change the priority in Task Manager
  • I have downloader a random app in the Microsoft Store after the game before running it
  • I run from both the Microsoft Store and Normal Windows Search
  • I have run the game with and without overclocking my GPU without issues since
  • I will usually fresh restart my PC before playing, not always, but just a precaution
  • I have uninstalled my anti-virus since it was avira
  • I’m running the newest drivers 416.70 I believe, I reverted back to 399 for a day but then an update ruined the game again so my testing has been on the most recent
  • Also updated windows as far as possible
  • Also also, I turned off the dynamic optimization in video settings, besides that I’m at 144 fps with Ultra settings.

(With that being said, none of the solutions in the forum or the support page helped, but I did do them so take a look at those if my solution doesn’t help)

Intro
So, long story short, it’s a RAM usage issue. I upgraded to Windows 10 for this game and inherited the ridiculous RAM usage that Windows 10 bugs have given us. One of the biggest to solve this issue is the Standby Memory usage, or rather the Microsoft Store App/Forza Horizon 4’s issue with handling the need to drop the Standby when all other free resources become allocated.

Step 1
So first thing I would do is download RAMMap and follow these instructions to clear your Standby Memory before playing.

  • RAMMap - RAMMap - Sysinternals | Microsoft Learn
  • Use the first reply by Gerry C J Cornell to clear standby - Redirecting
    (It will fill up again unfortunately, but depending on the age of your computer and the amount of programs/games you have it should help. For me, my Standyby size likes to sit at a whopping 5-5.5 GB. Most games handle dropping standby when free memory runs out, but FH4 does not.)

Test, maybe you don’t need Step 2
Next, while playing, use your Resource Monitor’s Memory Page to watch the Commit Charge column, if this reaches 100%, even with free memory available, your game will, again, crash.

Step 2
Coming from Windows 8 and having a smaller ssd as my C Drive, I disabled the paging file to save space. To anyone who currently has that disabled, follow this guide and re-enable it. Without a paging file, Windows will commit memory from your RAM for storing certain information that it wants to temporarily keep. (In the guide their numbers are quite high, I have space now so I actually made my max size 50ish GB, but I’m sure just turning it on helps too.)

After doing those two things, in that order, I haven’t had any issues yet. (I also have stayed in Horizon Solo so far as one of the steps to not crash was try Solo, it didn’t work for me, but I have yet to go online)

Conclusion
I hope this helps, sorry for making this long winded. I did it with the hope that maybe some Dev stumbles across it and can use my analysis to actually fix the game and allow it to handle RAM usage properly. Because if you notice, Microsoft is blindly guessing at not running certain applications alongside the game, no individual app is actually effecting Horizon, but one less app running means more RAM for FH4 to use.

Random PC and Horizon Stats for people wondering numbers:
In 45 minutes of playing FH4 committed 11,245,XXX KB of data to Memory, and it was growing, easy to see how you can run out of Memory even with 16 GB, and probably why users with 24 or 32 GB of RAM may have been avoiding these issues.

PC Specs:
Intel i5-4690 overclocked to 4.2GHz
16 GB of DDR3 RAM
ASUS Z71 I think
GTX 1070

7 Likes
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While I thought this was going to work at first, unfortunately for me it did not solve my crash issue. Before I upped the paging file, I did see that the commit charge was getting to like 80% or so. After, it was staying at 30%. But, as I said, I still crashed after about 10 minutes into the game. The only thing I haven’t tried myself yet is to see if going back to the 399 nvidia drivers fixes it. Might try that tomorrow.

Good idea though, for sure. Hope it helps someone.

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I have 32GB of ram (yes overkill, but i like all my DIM slots occupied) and i have crashes within 5-60 minutes (really random). From your post I was able to figure out that Forza, right at the moment of the crash, commits about 10 GB, works with 5 GB and Shareable RAM goes skyhigh from about 3 GB to 10 GB… Unfortunatly, step 2 didn’t work, so i’m just gonna sit here and wait for the development team to roll out a patch.

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Alright, a quick follow up. I used that DDU (Driver uninstaller) program and reinstalled the last 399 Nvidia drivers. This DID fix the crashing after 5-10 minutes for me. I have seen some people say the drivers past that have been more for the new RTX cards and have thrown some instability into the cards that most of us have.

So if you have an Nvidia card and you have the latest drivers, use DDU and install the 399 drivers. It should, possibly, help.

That being said, I did crash about an hour later, so it’s not totally fixed. At least it’s a bit more playable.

I did not have the memory monitor on when it crashed, but I opened it up as it was crashing. The commit charge was pretty high, at like 80%, so there is a possibility that even doing the OPs solution, it doesn’t totally fix the issue, but does give you a bit more play time.

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I’ve been playing a bit since I made this post, I got to around 2 hours before my first random crash. I noticed a random bump from 40 to 80% committed, then it crashed and went down to 40% again. So nothing hit 100% but I still crashed. But honestly 2 hours felt like an eternity from what I was used to. I added a bunch of other steps I took to my post, maybe some of those could help, but I do still randomly have crashes, I’m happy they aren’t before I can even drive to a race though. I’m on the newest drivers, but I did use 399 and had some success until yesterday, maybe I’ll re-rollback and test again.

Hmmm, like my reply above, there could be something weird about the game randomly committing way more RAM than it’s supposed too and that causes a fault and crash for the system. I’ll take a look at the logs next time I crash. Also like I said, I added all my other steps that I could think of that i’ve done, maybe, hopefully, some of those can also help you. I wish my post helped more, it seems this game has layers upon layers of issues that are underlying when crashing.

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Hey man I am just glad you made this post… Now it’s very clear to me that it’s an RAM issue… In my case it might be because FH4 is trying to share some gamedata or another program is trying to read it… Anyway a game shouldn’t be that unstable with other programms.

1 Like
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Yeah, it’s definitely something weird going on with memory allocation causing the crash, here is a screenshot of my Task Manager right after a crash.

[Album] imgur.com

What’s odd is that it’ll either crash in like the first minute, usually when loading into the house screen or right after leaving it. But it you make it past the first minute or so it’ll be fine for hours.

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Hmmm, open up resource monitory like I brought up earlier and see if it’s your committed RAM that is maxing. The issue is during loading, for some unknown reason, FH4 uses 100% CPU and 100% GPU, that immediately uses a ton of RAM from what I can tell. What I would recommend is restart your computer fresh, open only task manager and resource manager after you’ve used RAMMap to clear up that data, then monitor those memory lanes while playing. Don’t use anything else but the game, annoying? Yes, but right now necessary I think. THIS is all IF the RAM usage is your issue, if it’s not like some of the other replies, then maybe try the other random things I’ve done, this game has underlying issues that my solution unfortunately won’t fix.

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CPU and GPU at a 100% have nothing to do with RAM usage. Ghost Recon: Wildlands is way, way more demanding than this game CPU and GPU wise and uses much less RAM than this game does.

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I know, I was just letting him know that while loading up the CPU and GPU Max out, meaning that his random crashes on startup could actually be Windows or the game not handling the CPU or GPU Usage well and quitting. This game has a plethora of other issues besides this memory leak, could be one of those too lol.

I do agree with you though, I’ve played much more demanding games on my system without a crash for much longer while overclocking as well, this is obviously a game/windows store issue, not our systems.

Step 1 in my post is a longer version of this. Basically I use a tool that has a lot of other options besides just dropping the standby memory so that others, and myself, can look further into what programs are actually taking up that much standby memory. (and removing them completely if we want to)

The post you’re replying to here is scheduling a .exe program that does exactly what I describe, dropping the standby memory, every X minutes. I was going to write a little script myself to do it, but this may be easier. Depending on the amount of games you have on steam and your PC, and the length of time your PC has been alive, there’s a chance Windows 10 could be allocating 6+ GB of RAM to Standby applications for no reason. I’ve watched mine fill back up to 6.6 GB in 3 hours after I cleared it.

The stuttering cause is because rather than being about to just allocate to free memory, your computer would have to perform a delete function on currently allocated standby memory and then re-allocate it back to the game you’re playing, causing stuttering. (Or in FH4 fashion, it doesn’t handle this well, and just likes to crash)

1 Like
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Bro, I love you. Wow. That fixed 99% of the stutter in the game for me (it fixed the horrendous hitches at online races) and the game does not crash anymore, also the RAM usage never was above 6.1 GB, meaning that this Windows task also stops the memory leak that the game has and carries over Forza Horizon 3, way to go devs. I used the Reddit post to fix my issue, I created the task and I just could not believe how smooth the game was, all I got was 1 fps drop stutter 2 times, but that’s the game engine I believe. The hideous freezes I was having are GONE, honestly, I was going nuts over it and was getting pretty desperate. Thanks a million times for finding this. The sad and the pathetic parts is that normal users fix the games and Windows better than the devs themselves, just wow, I can’t even beging to express how pathetic that is.

1 Like
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I’m glad to hear that it worked for you bro, thank you for notifying.

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It is always started fresh, I have dual boot Windows 8.1 and 10. The Windows 10 side is ONLY for Forza, so it’s always fresh boot and into game.

The RamMap thing didn’t help any, still crashes often at startup, and I have a page file.

Commit Charge doesn’t go up during a crash either.

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Having the same issues. Guess I’ll just have to do the Goliath on the Xbox :frowning:

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This is interesting. I ‘only’ have 16gb RAM and I can (and do at weekends) play for 10 hours straight without any crashes. In fact I’ve only had two in-game crashes in total, (both times dxgmm2.sys BSOD) and I’ve been playing since the first day of the demo and then ultimate edition Early Access. The only CTD I’ve had is the first time I loaded the full game and it crashed at the splash screen because I had an MSI Afterburner overlay. Once I disabled that it has been fine since…

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If it helps you, both nVidia 411 drivers are broken and give BSOD no matter what on this game. The 399.24 drivers work fine at the game and are optimized for it so I would recommend you to give those a try.

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hey guys, if nothing works the same happened to me, must try this method, credits to StingyFilly69 that posted in another forum.

We found real solution and potential problem that causes crashes every 15 minutes

  1. Start the game and go to main menu (continue, settings, exit)
  2. Go to windowed mode (alt+enter). Stretch the window to max size
  3. Run the task manager (ctrl+alt+delete). Then details-explorer.exe process-shut it down
  4. Return to windowed mode game and now u can play without any crashes in online. (dont close task manager window)
  5. When u ve played, choose the task manager window again. Press file-run new task-explorer (run as administrator). After that the game close and ur pc will be ready for work. Also u can just reset ur pc after u finish playing.

So, the potentional problem is the conflict between game and xbox app and ur profile. When u shut down explorer process the connection between game and xbox app and ur profile will be broken. Also notice that u wont be able to play with friends, interact with clubs but u ll be able to play all other online activities. Also when explorer task run again, u ll recieve all earned game achievements to ur xbox profile.

18

I’m having the same issue. But I can play for 2-3 hours before the game crashes. (Well, I guess I’m privileged)

i7 7700
16gb ram
gtx 1080
ssd 240gb
Win 10 pro 1803 17134.320
Nvidia 416.16

All what I’m doing is clearing standby memory like this:

19

That looks interesting, I may try this, even so I have my page file on two SSDs it can never hurt.

Can you explain to me what it exactly does?

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https://i.imgur.com/p6uIPMn.png Dunno, it just crashed at this stage and it wasn’t close to 100% commit charge. It was ~80% for like 10 minutes since launch and then random crash.