[5.10] Won't start/freezes at launch

[Oraculo]

Hello all you happy people.

I had a nice game going on my computer until my motherboard conked out on me, prompting me to bite the bullet and rebuild my PC with a whole new mobo, CPU, GPU, and RAM but re-using my PSU and storage devices. After assembly, Windows 11 allowed me to re-activate by reassigning my license, so I did not need to re-install Windows. It's been a very smooth transition.

However, after it, X4: Foundations refuses to launch.

At first, I simply got a white window. After deleting the handful of files mentioned on the Steam troubleshooting page failed, I tried clearing out the profile under %DOCUMENTS%\Egosoft\X4 while disabling steam cloud so that it would generate a whole new profile. This has simply resulted in a black screen with a cursor on the first bootup - and, after telling Steam to "Stop" X4, further launches cause the process to start but no window appears, it doesn't switch to full-screen, etc. I can see it running on the taskbar, but not switch to it.

There are never any error messages and it doesn't crash... it just keeps "running, but doing nothing" until I kill it.

I can't figure out how to attach the diagnostics as requested... there's no button here on the post editor for "attach!"

Current specs:

MOTHERBOARD: ASUS ROG B550-XE
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
RAM: 64gb via 4 sticks of F4-3600C17-16GTZKK by G.Skill
GPU: EVGA nVidia GeForce RTX 3890Ti
STORAGE: 2x Samsung 970 Evo 1TB M.2 NVMe SSDs.

[CBJ]

As per the instructions in the first thread at the top of the forum, you can either just copy and paste the text for your DXDiag and vulkaninfo into one or more posts, or upload the files somewhere and provide a link. We won't be able to help much without those.

In the meantime, you can try performing a full local file verification using the Steam client.

[Oraculo]

Did the verification twice, and it still didn't help. Forgot to mention that.

DxDiag: https://pastebin.com/0gPvBNCB

Vulkaninfo: https://pastebin.com/LMQxZ2V4

[CBJ]

All of your sound drivers apart from the ones associated with your graphics card appear to pre-date the release of Windows 11. I suggest you actually disable the graphics card's sound device entirely, and update the drivers for your on-board Realtek device. If you can find newer drivers for your external speakers then update those too, though I suspect there may not be any.

You might also want to uninstall and reinstall your NVIDIA drivers while you're at it. There are a number of non-game related crash events in your data, which might imply some issues with the driver setup. Please note that whether other games launch or not is not a good indicator here; unless they use Vulkan, which most don't, they will be using different driver features.

[Oraculo]

Updated my Realtek Audio drivers and reinstalled (with clean option enabled) the latest nVidia Drivers.

Same deal. X4 not working.

I tested another Vulkan game - Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation (ensuring that Api=vulkan in its settings file) and it worked fine.

Hmmmm.

[Imperial Good]

You have 2 displays? Try unplugging the secondary one and trying to run X4 in case it is some issue with display selection. If it is and X4 launches successfully then there might be more practical work arounds or solutions.

[Oraculo]

This also fails to achieve anything.

I am however, now more reliably seeing a "black screen with an X4 blue cursor" that never progresses beyond that, than the "blank icon on taskbar and infinite spinny".

Clearing out the profile should have cleared all of its graphics settings. It's not resolution though - when I set my desktop resolution to 1920x1080 with an empty profile folder, it doesn't help.

HDR makes no difference if on or off.

G-SYNC on or off makes no difference.

My gut's telling me it has to do with my card or the drivers...

[Imperial Good]

You can try using Display Driver Uninstaller (third party tool) to completely remove the graphic drivers. Download the offline installer for the latest game ready from Nvidia. Then when not connected to the internet (to prevent Microsoft update from interfering) use display driver uninstaller to remove the existing graphic drivers and restart. Then clean install the Nvidia graphic drivers using the offline installer.

Maybe the steam shader cache is not working. Try opting out of pre-built shaders in case.