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GTX 970 gray screen during gameplay

Agent ZeusChops·12/29/2019, 7:09:39 PM·1 votes·1,508 views

So I’ve been playing League consistently since 8.0 with a Zotac GTX 970 graphics card and haven’t really had any issues until recently when the card will let me play for about 2 or 3 matches before starting to receive a gray screen mid-gameplay only to have to wait for Windows to recover from the issue. I did some digging and found out that nvlddmd.sys (or something very close to that, I’m not at the PC while posting this) has been crashing during gameplay. I suspect that League of Legends does not directly interact with NVIDIA’s driver API otherwise this would likely not be an issue should the game hand off as much as it could to the NVIDIA driver instead of handling graphics settings within League itself. But as far as I can infer without knowing technical details, I can only narrow this down to either be a temperature or memory issue. The GTX 970 series was gimped after launch due to an issue with 0.75GB of VRAM and I think League is trying to access that last gigabyte of VRAM unknowingly and hitting this issue, though I could be wrong.

Temperatures stay between 35°C and 75°C from power on through League gameplay.

VRAM usage spikes above 70% on occasion with League on medium/high/very high graphics settings - which can all cause the issue.

Two ways to temporarily fix; restart the PC/wait for Windows to restart the driver, or turn graphics down to very low or else just low.

Note; this didn’t start happening to me until after 9.22, the current version of the League client seems to be having this issue and I haven’t done too much to the card except apply new thermal paste on the cooler and cpu and reseat it on the motherboard with the gray screen issue still occurring and windows reporting a driver error.

5 Comments

Malix Farwin12/29/2019, 7:15:43 PM1 votes

i have the same card and do not experience that issue. Possibly an issue with your card.

Agent ZeusChops1/14/2020, 7:23:33 AM1 votes

I think I have identified the issue as something specific to using the undocumented client-side API and I do have some questions now. Blitz.gg is a third-party application that I mainly use for runes and trying to learn how to play different champions better overall, while trying to figure out my issue it looks like blitz.gg is somehow interacting with the League client in some way to cause the client API to crash, resulting in a gray screen in-game and League needing to restart the failed processes as it appears the game client is launched and uses an API from the main menu client thing.

I will follow up with a report to blitz.gg, but does this also count for a third-party client or is that specific to replacing Riot’s launcher and game? If anybody can answer this, thanks.