Game Not Launching (Windows 11, Nvidia Graphics)

[stahlhart]

I have two PCs, both are Z690 builds, one with a 12600K and one with a 13700K. Both run Steam from the same account. The 12600K build has an RTX 3070Ti, and the 13700K build an RTX 4090. Both are current for Nvidia drivers (561.09). The 12600K build runs Windows 10 22H2, and the 13700K build runs Windows 11 23H2.

I have an older game in my Steam library, Operation Flashpoint: Red River. This is a GFWL title that was originally issued on physical media with SecuROM DRM. The game launches and plays correctly from Steam on the Windows 10 / 12600K build.

On the 13700K build, launching the game from Steam results in it crashing and throwing a 1000 Application event for the main executable (RedRiver.exe). The code for the crash is an access violation error, 0xC0000005. If I uninstall the Nvidia drivers here, and I have the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter drivers for the GPU in their place by default, the game will then launch, but it will hang with a black screen just before its main menu appears.

Just wondering if anyone has run into a situation similar to this, or alternatively has an idea of what it might be about a GPU driver that would cause a game executable to crash like this.

The game used to launch and play correctly on this Windows 11 build just like on the windows 10 one, but somewhere over the course of time it stopped working.

Anyone?

Something that I forgot to add: I have the game on installation DVD. The version on disc is 1.0, which is updated to 1.2 through GFWL the first time you launch it.

If I install the game from the disc, it will launch as a new 1.0 installation (it needs to check the drive for the presence of the disc, due to DRM). If the game then phones in to GFWL and downloads and installs the update, attempting to launch it fails with the same 1000 event that the Steam binaries do.

The 1.2 Steam version launches and plays correctly on the Windows 10 build.

Edit: one last thing to add -- a Steam friend also has this game, and it launches fine for him on Windows 11 23H2, so this issue is unique to my build.

 

[stahlhart]

In case anyone is still reading this post (and it's okay if you aren't), I was able to launch the game successfully with Windows 11 installed on a laptop here, so the problem appears to be some sort of gremlin in my main desktop, possibly something like Visual C++ runtimes, but to be honest I am completely lost at this point without any real diagnostic scope to use.

The ironic thing about that laptop is that, while it can launch OFRR, I am having no luck with GFWL on it, with every game requiring it (I am testing Lost Planet 2 and Section 8 in addition to OFRR) throwing a 0x8007065b error when I attempt to authenticate in game. These games launch fine with GFWL everywhere else here besides the laptop.

What a mess. Unfortunate that not every developer / publisher was conscientious about removing that horrible DRM when Microsoft killed it.

 

[stahlhart]

In case there are still a few hangers on here: I found the problem. Operation Flashpoint: Red River does not appear to be able to run on RTX 40xx cards.

All this time that I had been going down the operating system and runtime rabbit holes in vain, and tonight the pieces finally started falling into place -- it wasn't that the game ran on Windows 10 but not on Windows 11, it was that it ran on the 3070Ti and not the 4090. Tonight, I enabled the iGPU in the 13700K and switched to it as the primary adapter, and the game launched, did not hang (as it did previously with the 4090 as a Microsoft Basic Display Adapter), authenticated to GFWL automatically, and enabled the DLC. Too bad that the iGPU isn't strong enough to run the game.

GFWL is still broken on the laptop, by the way. God knows what I did to mess things up there in the process of all of this troubleshooting. But that's for another day.

Edit:

Above is the event log that gets thrown when the game is launched.

I just reset Windows on the laptop, and am not going to bother with GFWL on it any further. Done with this.

 

[stahlhart]

Well, not completely done. Feeling like I have nothing left to lose, I opened a support ticket with Nvidia. I know, for a fourteen-year-old game.

 

[Vayra86]

I had a suggestion but it seems like you've already pinpointed the 4090, and going by the story, it seems like we have a winner there. If that changes, try sourcing a different version (perhaps even a diff version #) from places unmentioned.

Have you checked whether the specific application (game) is running with or without any compatibility settings? Also, check NV control panel for its game specific settings, set all to application controlled. There might be some space there you haven't touched, the idea is of course to be running the game as it wants to run, not with any current day improvements. Also, lock your refresh rate to 60.

Similar limitations will be in place if you run hardware as a 'basic display adapter', sometimes it even defaults to a low resolution, so this might actually get your game playable too.

 

[stahlhart]

I had a suggestion but it seems like you've already pinpointed the 4090, and going by the story, it seems like we have a winner there. If that changes, try sourcing a different version (perhaps even a diff version #) from places unmentioned.

Have you checked whether the specific application (game) is running with or without any compatibility settings? Also, check NV control panel for its game specific settings, set all to application controlled. There might be some space there you haven't touched, the idea is of course to be running the game as it wants to run, not with any current day improvements. Also, lock your refresh rate to 60.

Similar limitations will be in place if you run hardware as a 'basic display adapter', sometimes it even defaults to a low resolution, so this might actually get your game playable too.

I'm not currently using any compatibility settings on the Windows 10 build with the 3070Ti that is able to run the game. I've tried pretty much every combination of them on the Windows 11 box, to no avail.

Nvidia closed the support ticket after having me run through pretty much all of the troubleshooting steps I had already tried, so they're punting it over to Codemasters, meaning that it's never going to get fixed, as this is 14 years old and abandoned (and no longer for sale on Steam to boot). At least I can still play it fine on the W10 box; it's just sort of sticking in my craw that there is this one game that won't run on the main rig. Maybe Blackwell will fix it, who knows.

 

[XpanD]

Bit of a long shot, but maybe running the game through DXVK for Windows would work? That would translate all the DirectX calls into Vulkan calls, which could potentially bypass the issue.

 

[azrael]

Would've thought this was a VBS issue.

 

[bug]

Well, not completely done. Feeling like I have nothing left to lose, I opened a support ticket with Nvidia. I know, for a fourteen-year-old game.

Fingers crossed.

 

[stahlhart]

Bit of a long shot, but maybe running the game through DXVK for Windows would work? That would translate all the DirectX calls into Vulkan calls, which could potentially bypass the issue.

I tried this, and dgVoodoo also, but no luck -- I made it past the SecuROM launcher (redriverlauncher.exe) with DXVK, which generated a log, but just silence and the inevitable exit back to the desktop for RedRiver.exe. DXVK creates an empty log file for it, but it doesn't write anything.

That's one of the most frustrating things about this, is that I can't get any debug trail or progress logging to see exactly why the game executable quits back to the Steam client, other than the 1000 event getting thrown. Maybe Codemasters didn't completely or correctly patch out the DRM for the Steam binaries? I know that that was an issue for some other GFWL releases here. But it launches and runs fine in Windows 10 with the build that has the 3070Ti.

My wife has a 4070 Super in her build, and the same error occurs there. That was the initial thing that led me down the wrong rabbit hole, because these two PCs are the only desktops in the house with Windows 11. But when I remembered that we have a laptop with Windows 11, I installed Steam and the game there, and it launched (though for some reason I was never able to get the GFWL client working here). The laptop has a Radeon iGPU and a GTX 1660. And then a friend on Steam has the game, and his build is Windows 11 and a Radeon GPU, and the game works there.

So the failure mode ended up being logically reduced to one scenario: an Nvidia 40xx card with Nvidia drivers installed.

Would've thought this was a VBS issue.

Me, too. You'd think that the developer provided runtimes would be sufficient, but maybe that's operating system specific. I did find a RAR bundle of all of the 32- and 64-bit C++ runtimes, and I will try that just to rule it out. The other thing I was going to try was to roll back to the launch 40xx driver from October 2022, I think it's or 522.25. Probably not a realistic solution long term, but it would completely eliminate the graphics drivers themselves being a factor.

All of this one older mediocre game, Jesus. I feel like Wile E. Coyote opening a crate of Acme Game Patch.

Fingers crossed.

You can uncross them now Nvidia told me yesterday to contact the game developer for a fix. Which makes sense, because the game works fine on the Windows 10 build with the 3070Ti with 561.09.

It's not just the drivers, it's the drivers installed on a 40xx card that breaks RedRiver.exe. It doesn't look like they want to delve any deeper into the problem apart from the usual clean uninstall and reinstall drivers, run sfc / dism etc. Someone needs to put the executable under a debugging monitor of sorts to see where the failure occurs, and then the executable's source code would probably have to be reopened after that. Not going to happen for a long since abandoned game like this.

 

[bug]

You can uncross them now Nvidia told me yesterday to contact the game developer for a fix. Which makes sense, because the game works fine on the Windows 10 build with the 3070Ti with 561.09.

It's not just the drivers, it's the drivers installed on a 40xx card that breaks RedRiver.exe. It doesn't look like they want to delve any deeper into the problem apart from the usual clean uninstall and reinstall drivers, run sfc / dism etc. Someone needs to put the executable under a debugging monitor of sorts to see where the failure occurs, and then the executable's source code would probably have to be reopened after that. Not going to happen for a long since abandoned game like this.

Bummer. Such a speedy answer means the problem was known already. And while Nvidia would have reason to fix a driver bug, good luck getting the developer to fix their game for a platform that didn't exist when the game launched
Your best hope now would be a community patch.

 

[stahlhart]

I doubt that anyone is paying any attention to this old thread any longer. but just for the sake of keeping it updated it appears that the Windows 11 / Nvidia driver problem with OF:RR is not confined to only 40xx cards. A few days ago, I upgraded the 12600K build with the RTX 3070Ti to 24H2, and it now throws the same 0xC0000005 access violation error upon launching the game as the 13700K build with the RTX 4090. But I don't have enough additional combinations of hardware and graphics cards to troubleshoot or isolate it any further than this.

Another PC here still running Windows 10 22H2, which is a "retro" build that also supports Windows 7 and XP with multiple booting, is still able to launch the game. This build has an i7-3770K in a Z77 motherboard with an EVGA 4Gb GTX 680. I can at least still play this old game somewhere, lol.