Impossible to start the game

[Kot]

The game crashes on startup with the following crash message:

I've exhausted the obvious options like reinstalls, driver updates and such. Looking at some other threads it seems that it has been said it's a problem with the driver or windows itself, but no other game or program seems to have any issue. Searching for similar problems brings up nothing as they're usually not applicable (Linux/Mac operating systems rather than Windows).

[Tomislav Uzelac]

Hi, your Nvidia driver is up to date but your Windows is 4 major versions behind (19041, May 2020 update).

Latest Nvidia drivers can cause problems when used with older Windows versions. The error reported in the log is consistent with this.

I would recommend updating Windows to the latest (November 2021) version.

Cheers!

[Kot]

I didn't notice that. That is curious, because Windows tells me I'm on 19043.1348. DxDiag supports that as well. Game crash log still says 19041. Is there any reason why it wouldn't detect Windows updates?
I don't think I have an easy way of checking if Nvidia detects the proper Windows version, and if that even matters.

[Tomislav Uzelac]

You are right, I just checked on my 100% fully updated machine and I am also getting 19041.

I made a note to investigate, possibly this a bug in Python version 3.8 that we are using. Perhaps it's time to move on from that version.

That brings us no closer to solving the issue though.

I have no good ideas: the log reports that S3 texture compression is not available in the driver, and that's a very basic thing. The situation still suggests some brokenness in OS/driver even though your system is probably up to date. I don't know what that could be.

Sorry I can't be of more help.