Some Steam Games don't launch properly after video card upgrade

[Dreigo42]

I just upgraded my graphics card from an HD6670 to an R9 270X and many of my Steam games are not launching properly. I have re-installed the drivers several times, re-installed Steam, the games, and DirectX and still no dice. Most games will get to the point where they go fullscreen but then freeze almost instantly after that and require the Task manager to kill the process to get them to quit. On a few, Steam then tries to launch it again. Other games (Skyrim, New Vegas, and a few others) run without a problem and games that aren't using Steam (Battlefield,etc) are working flawlessly. I'm running out of ideas so I'm hoping that someone can help me!

My Rig
FX-8320
16GB DDR3 RAM
R9-270X 4GB
XFX 750W PSU
Crucial M4 SSD with 2 7200rpm Platter drives.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

There is always the possibility that the new card is defective. Can you test the new card in another system, or conversely, swap back the original card and see if the problems are resolved?

Both cards should run using the same drivers, so installing new ones each time may not be necessary.

Edit: While it should be self-explanatory, make sure every power connector on the new card is firmly connected. I believe the R9 270X requires two six-pin PCI-e connections for power.

 

[Dreigo42]

There is always the possibility that the new card is defective. Can you test the new card in another system, or conversely, swap back the original card and see if the problems are resolved?

Both cards should run using the same drivers, so installing new ones each time may not be necessary.

Edit: While it should be self-explanatory, make sure every power connector on the new card is firmly connected. I believe the R9 270X requires two six-pin PCI-e connections for power.

I will check those out tomorrow after work and let you know. Thanks for the help.

UPDATE: Turns out it's doing the exact same thing with the old card. So, I'm pretty much ruling out a bad card here. The old card is in perfect working order, it simply lacked the power I wanted for gaming in 1080p. So I'm pretty much back to square one. I did double check that the new card was seated properly and the 6-pin PCIe connectors were fully connected. So it can't be that either.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

You might verify that you're running Steam as an Administrator (right mouse click the icon you use to launch Steam and select Run as Administrator) and also verify that your game caches are in good working order. Right mouse-click your game that won't load in the Library and choose Properties. Select the Local files tab and click the Verify integrity of game cache button.

 

[Dreigo42]

You might verify that you're running Steam as an Administrator (right mouse click the icon you use to launch Steam and select Run as Administrator) and also verify that your game caches are in good working order. Right mouse-click your game that won't load in the Library and choose Properties. Select the Local files tab and click the Verify integrity of game cache button.

Thanks for all the ideas, I finally decided to just re-install Windows. The current installation has been through several in-place upgrades from 7 to 8.1 as well as several major hardware changes including a motherboard/cpu change. Everything seems to work well now after I verify the files one last time so it recreates the registry entries and then the games launch and play without a hitch. My best bet is that it was one of the .NET frameworks got messed up but who knows which.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Glad to hear you got it up and running again and thanks for sharing what the solution was! 🙂