Totally naive app using proxy/dll forwarding to try and get Elden Ring running on DX12 hardware with Feature level 11_0 (f.e. Nvidia Kepler GPUs)
To be honest I just got really pissed that Elden Ring crashes with the famous WSOD (White Screen of Death) on my GPU (NVIDIA Tesla K40 using off-screen rendering), I never imagined that I'd actually get something working :-)
So this is it:
- Some debugging revealed that in my case the white screen of death is caused by failing to properly initialize DX12 (and not bothering to check the return code...)
- To be more specific: The game seems to call D3D12CreateDevice with a min required feature level of D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_12 - which is greater than the max. supported feature level on NVIDIA Kepler GPUs (11_0)
- After that things go downhill fast (mainly because the game doesn't seem to perform proper error handling)...
So this project tries to do the following in order to maybe get elden ring working for your old non-supported D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_11_0 GPU:
- provide a "fake" d3d12.dll that will be loaded instead of the real d3d12.dll by elden ring (when placed in the elden ring game exe folder)
- the "fake" d3d12.dll just forwards all but one function to the original d3d12 dll (that has to be placed in the same folder and renamed to d3d12_original.dll)
- the "fake" d3d12.dll provides a different implementation of D3D12CreateDevice (the function call that fails), which just calls the original D3D12CreateDevice function with the same parameters but D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL set to 11_0 instead of 12_0
- -> This usually leads to successfull D3D12 init and - to my complete surprise - getting ingame on my Nvidia Kepler GPU
- -> The whole project is very likely not a good example how to do something like this, so use with caution ! I just thought this might be helpful for other people stuck on Nvidia GTX 6xx or 7xx series GPUS, no guarantees or anything !
How to try this out ?
-Build this project with Visual Studio 2019 (community edition will do) using the x64 target (or just grab the debug dll file from the github release)
-Grab the real d3d12.dll and d3d12core.dll from your windows/system32 folder, place both dlls in the elden ring game folder (where eldenring.exe is located) AND RENAME the real d3d12.dll to d3d12_original.dll (the one inside the game folder, NOT the dll in windows/system32)
-Place the new "fake" d3d12.dll in the elden ring game folder, too (where eldenring.exe is located)
-Try to launch elden ring, now you should get past the white screen :-)
Hints:
- The WSOD is just a symptom and apparently has different causes - only try this if you exhausted all other possible causes any your GPU is the likely culprit
- You may need to use a version of elden ring with copy protection removed, this change is likely to trigger anti-cheat and anti-debugging/drm measures, so don't expect this to play nice with the retail version
- Try to start eldenring.exe directly, not via the start_protected_game.exe (EasyAnti-Cheat has to be disabled, so only offline play should work)
- Maybe grab DebugView (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/debugview) and watch the eventlog while launching elden ring: You should see some debug messages from the fake dll like this:
[15016] D3D12CreateDevice-LoadLibrary Result:3360000
[15016] D3D12CreateDevice - Proxy function called!
[15016] D3D12CreateDevice - Original function address queried
[15016] D3D12CreateDevice-CallResult:0 -> this is the return code of D3D12CreateDevice and can used to check the for error messages (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3ddxgi/dxgi-error)