Problems With Chrome and PC Games

Recently I have been having some serious issues with some of my computer games. They would suddenly freeze or do a crash to the desktop. Most of the games that I had noticed this were older games like Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim and Mass Effect 2.

Because 3 of those games use the same game engine, I was leaning towards that with Mass Effect 2 just being a the odd ball out. But then I ran into the same issue with all three Bioshock games and then Crysis 2.

I was not having this issue with other games, such as 7 Days To Die, Diablo 3 and indie games like Stranded Deep.

My first thought was it might of had something to do with a Windows 7 update due to the fact that all my games ran just fine with my current hardware not too many months ago. That and the fact that if I reboot my computer with Linux Mint all my games that will run with Linux were not suffering the same problem.

Hunting around on the internet for solutions, which was problematic as there were as many suggested ideas of what might be wrong as there are games out there, I started sifting through what I was finding for a common point. I finally found one:

Google Chrome.

On various discussion boards around the internet, I found discussions of people suggesting the problem lay with the Chrome browser, and these were recent discussions. At first I dismissed that idea out of hand because I normally am not running my web browser while playing any of my games.

I've also been using Chrome for many years now and had never had an issue before, so I kept looking for this to be a Windows issue.

Out of all the possible problems, I could not find a common root with most of the games (and this took me quite a while because of all the discussions out there, heh). Then I remembered the discussion about Chrome.

So with nothing really to loose, I uninstalled Chrome, going back to Firefox, and started playing the games.

Not one crash happened. Some of these games I played for half the day, and there was not one hiccup at all.

Okay, that doesn't really mean that Chrome was the problem. It could have been something else that I did or over looked, right?

Right, so in order to see if it was Chrome, I reinstalled it, and went back to playing the games.

Everyone of them would crash at some point. Some within the first 3 minutes of playing, some taking up to 30 minutes. But crash each of them did.

So once again, I uninstalled Chrome and went back to testing.

Once again: No crashes. Each game played for hours (this has taken me many days to test) and again there were no sudden freezes or CTDs.

I thought about my Linux Mint, and the fact that I use Firefox with it.

To me, that's pretty conclusive that there is something with Chrome that is causing my games to crash and the discussions I saw were right. It doesn't seem to happen to everyone, but it appears I'm one of those that are having an issue too.

I'm not sure when this started, as I've been very busy for months and not playing a lot of these games. However, I had seen in some of the discussions around the web going back to January of this year on this.

So if any of you have been getting some random crashes with your games over the last six months, and you use Chrome as your browser, you might want to try this too. Switch to a different browser and uninstall Chrome for a while and see if it makes a difference.

I've sent a message to the Chrome team, not really expecting an answer, but I did get one. It was basically the same old:

"Try updating your drivers."

Right. Like that wasn't the first thing I tried, and the fact that a LOT of drivers now a days do auto updates.....

Hope this helps someone else out there.

Sounds wierd, anyway, not sure if it works but CCleaner have solved many mysterious problems on my Pc's, scanning for registry problems and fixing.

Worth a try, if you do not have it it's a must have to make your Pc run smooth as butter...

CCleaner

a reply to: eriktheawful

It was in the news the other day, Chrome has a backdoor exploit that enables the microphone on the host computer, no matter what the user has it set to. There's probably a conflict with the game, caused by the exploit. Someone somewhere has been listening to you play World of Warcraft

Link

Thanks for the heads up. I use Chrome and I've been playing Fallout 3 recently as well, and was crashing. I started playing in windowed mode and that fixed it, but now its... Well. Windowed.

It's probably a shared .dll

Since Google uses graphic acceleration and never likes to shut itself off, they might be conflicting. Maybe a framework update?

Along with Google Chrome comes a background program called googleupdate or gupdate.

I'm a computer technician and I have many many doubts that that's what's causing problems and that's it's a total SPY and scans EVERYTHING you do with your computer. Google Chrome wasn't built for people that consider privacy important.

originally posted by: eisegesis
It's probably a shared .dll

Since Google uses graphic acceleration and never likes to shut itself off, they might be conflicting. Maybe a framework update?

This is what I was seeing in the discussions about this. That it might be a shared .dll and that Chrome's graphic acceleration may have been changed in a recent update that is causing a conflict with other things, like games, that may use the same .dll

It would make sense as the problem is there whether you have Chrome up and running at the same time as your game, or even if you do not have it up and running.

And my framework is up to date, but did not make a difference.

a reply to: Bilk22

Oh I hope not! Mainly because I don't play World of Warcraft!



Now Diablo 3 on the other hand...........

a reply to: eriktheawful I changed browsers for similar reasons. I use Maxthon. It's good for gaming, user friendly, the whole internet doesn't seem to know who I am while browsing or the last thing I bought online.

Could be a GPU driver issue, do you have a dedicated graphics card (I'm guessing so judging by the games you play) ? Nvidia cards sometimes encounter a few problems with chrome, depending on driver version, or gpu driver update that went wrong (it happens)

I would start by uninstalling the gpu drivers with DDU (can be downloaded on guru3d, it's a freeware) and then reinstall the lastest driver for your card.

a reply to: WeSbO

AMD Radeon HD 7700 series. Love nVidia cards, but went with this one about a year ago.

Driver is always kept up to date, and I always completely remove the old driver before installing the new one. Made no difference.

I do the same for all my drivers, audio, chipsets, etc.

a reply to: eriktheawful

I have an issue with Skyrim that causes the graphics driver on my laptop to crash. When I enter certain areas or caves in game, or anywhere near water, I get this strange effect that isn't quite stuttering but it just stops rendering frames and freezes. You can hear the ambience and the background sounds are uneffected. If I alt-tab out, I get the notice that the graphics driver stopped and had to be recovered. When I alt+tab back in, the game freezes completely and the audio goes haywire.

The GPU on my laptop is an 840M. It's a great GPU and can play BF4 with no issues, on low of course. So I'm not sure what would be causing the crashes. Everything I've tried so far has failed. I don't have any Google services or Chrome installed on the laptop. But that doesn't mean that there wasn't something at some point on there that I've forgotten about.

I'm going to try your solution and see how it goes.

a reply to: EternalSolace

Can't help you with your lap top as I don't use one for gaming, all though I do know there are plenty of them out there for that.

For gaming I use my desktop as a serious rig for serious gaming, including a surround sound system in my room (which makes me snap my head around every time I hear a zombie creeping up on me, hehehehe).

a reply to: eriktheawful

My laptop isn't my main gaming rig. It's just for when I'm on the go and I mainly use it for lighter games. I have a lot of downtime at work and that's why I got this particular laptop.

At any rate, I have a desktop for my primary gaming rig. I don't have any issues with Skyrim, or any games for that matter, with it. I don't have Chrome installed on my desktop, and never have to my knowledge. So I've never come accross this issue on my desktop.

a reply to: eriktheawful

Chrome can do wonky things even when you don't have it active. We discovered this at our workplace. It would have a tendency to cause strange "redbox" bugs with out proofing program, highlighting things as too long for the allotted space that really weren't, even if you were running the proof program in Explorer, not Chrome.

If true it sounds like something MS would do "by accident" to get people off Chrome back to IE.

Just an FYI I use Chrome and Win7 and have no problems with any games.

a reply to: OccamsRazor04

Not everyone does. My wife and 3 sons, each have Win 7 and use Chrome with no problems either. But then they also all have different hardware than me. So it could be a combination of things.

I was seeing that too in these discussions about this.