God of war PC does not launch - Crash resolution and optimization strategy for your PC - Troubleshooting tutorial - 2023

Fixed launch crashes God of war PC. Different strategies for optimizing your machine to improve the gaming experience.

God of war is one of my favorite games and maybe one of the best of all time. I highly recommend it to anyone who has never tried it.

If you like gore mixed with various actions, God of War PC is for you. Many of those who have attempted to install it will certainly experience a number of problems getting it to work.

In this post, we will show you how to fix them to make it work in your windows PC.

In this section:

Requirements to play god of war pc

Before going any further, it is important to know the hardware requirements of the game you want to install.

Minimum system requirements:

64-bit operating system and processor required

Operating system : 10 64-bit Windows

Processor : Intel i5-2500k (4 core 3.3 GHz) or AMD Ryzen 3 1200 (4 core 3.1 GHz)

RAM: 8 GB of memory

Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 960 (4 GB) or AMD R9 290X (4 GB)

DirectX: version 11

Disk space : 70 GB of available disk space

Additional notes: DirectX feature level 11_1 required

The different crashes and errors when starting the game God of War PC

God of war PC - Crash resolution and strategy for optimizing your PC - Troubleshooting tutorial - 2022

We are not going to detail in this tutorial the different stages of installing the game.

To have God of War on PC, we bought it on Steam and installed it in our system like any other game from this service.

After downloading and installing which can take a few hours, you will probably encounter some problems like us. These problems appeared to us in the following order:

On startup, the message "error: you need at least D3D_Feature_Level 11_1" is displayed in front of a full dark screen.

The game crashes without even displaying anything

In the next section, we will show you how to solve each error mentioned above.

Error: you need at least D3D_Feature_Level 11_1

The first time I launched God of War on my PC I got this traumatic error.

you need at least D3D_Feature_Level 11_1

When you get this error, your first instinct should be to update your directX.

If this does not work, you can follow the steps that follow. The principle is to install a tool that will fulfill the prerequisites of the hard-downloaded game. Here are the steps

Download the latest version of DXVK from this link: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases

After downloading the “tar” file, extract it. You can extract it to any part of your PC as long as it is easy to access.

In the folder of the extracted file, you will find the folder x32 and folder x64 . These files represent the architecture of your processor. Go to the folder that corresponds to your processor. Normally it should be the x64 folder because this processor required to run God of War on PC. To see Requirements to play god of war pc.

Once in the folder, copy all the files .dll (without mercy ). We will paste it in the root of the God of War installation folder.

To go to the game installation folder:
- Right click on the game launcher in Steam -> click on Open File Location
- In the folder, paste the dlls that you copied earlier

If everything is done correctly, you will no longer see the error you need at least D3D_Feature_Level 11_1 .

If things were that simple we would stop there.

The next error we encountered is much worse and crueler than the first. The previous error had disappeared. Just disappeared. What happened next is that the game crashes without displaying anything.

In the rest of the tutorial, we will show you how we solved it.

Crash when starting the game God of war PC, without message.

It may happen that when starting the game, it crashes without leaving any messages indicating the source of the problem.

Most often, the crash of your hard downloaded game comes from the fact that your graphics driver is not at its latest update.

The solution as you already guessed is to update your graphics driver. We don't all use the same drivers so I would advise you to consult the update tutorials that correspond to the type of graphics card in your PC.

Since my pc uses NVDIA graphics card, I will ask you to check the link nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx to download the driver that best suits your graphics card.

How to optimize PC games on the example of GOD OF WAR PC

Now that you have been able to start the game, another important step must be taken into account.

I had mentioned above that my PC did not have the minimum specifications required to play this game.

For the pleasure of hacking and finding solutions for those who do not want to invest in another computer, we are going to give you some tips to make the GOD OF WAR game on PC a little more bearable.

To achieve this, I found three possible strategies that can be added at will to improve the result. This does not only work on the game god of war but also on other PC games that I have been able to test. Here are the possible strategies:

Configure your game's graphics resolution in its settings – that's the basics

Overlock your PC

Buy an external graphics card (Not tested)

Now that you know what to expect, let's get down to business.

Configuring Graphics Resolution

This is the most important aspect for any self-respecting PC gamer. It is also very important to mention it among the game operation optimization solutions. God of war PC is not even spared by this strategy.

I won't go into the details of how exactly one can configure the graphics of a PC game.

In practice, it varies from game to game, but in theory, it's very simple. From the game's home page, Follow the path Option/Parameter -> Graphics.

Most of the time, it's written graphics settings but what you need to know is that everything is in the game options and well before launching it.

The graphics resolution of the God of War PC game that I strongly recommend is that of the bare minimum possible.

The goal is to see how the game performs when its graphics settings are at their lowest possible. Generally that's how I proceed before making small changes during the game but I recommend that you be patient.

I recommend that you go immediately to the next step which consists of boosting our CPU and the graphics card of our PC by Overlocking.

PC Overlock

The concept of Overlocking consists in operating the components of our computer above the limit established by the manufacturers.

This process, although useless in most modern PCs, which are already very powerful, is still a method that should not be ignored.

If you cannot comfortably play God of war PC, your machine is not powerful enough to support the graphics loads of the game.

Overlocking your machine may help to better support lags and jumps. Don't count on this method to fully play all games with high hardware requirements, but be sure, you will feel some improvements.

Overlocking a PC is generally safe but zero risk does not exist.

Be very careful in overlocking your machine, as it can cause your machine to crash when it's improperly run or destroy your machine (in very very very rare cases, but it is possible).

By following the instructions, you agree that TediDev and Zetaplus will not be held responsible for your errors and breakdowns. To start :

Download and install the software Msi AfterBurner

When starting the program, depending on the version, you will find an interface similar to the image below:

My minimum msi afterburner configuration to improve the perfs of god of war pc

I'm running on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M and my current configuration to improve the fluidity of certain games is:

CORE CLOCK (MHz) +98

MEMORY CLOCK (MHz) +196

Exactly as in the picture above.

You can go further in overlocking your computer by following the following tutorial video.

Buy an external graphics card (or eGPU)

If you have a laptop, this section is for you. In case you already have a desktop, you can pass.

Yes, there is now a way to boost your machine with modern graphics cards without disassembling it.

It's about using external graphics cards. I discovered their existence while doing research for this post, I have never used an external graphics card but I must admit that I am very tempted.

The general principle of the external graphics card is quite simple. You have to buy the box, insert a powerful graphics card and then connect it to your computer and your external screen.

Many opinions tend to confirm that it works wonderfully but I found other people who criticize the system. mention the fact that they always have to restart their laptop for it to work.

Basically, external graphics cards would perform less well than a tower with the same graphics card. This seems logical to me because of the limit of data transmission that the connection cables can support.

The external graphics card brings laptops closer to the Desktop by making them more modular and expandable. From now on, only desktop PCs can upgrade the graphics card.

Now that we have come to the end, the sequel introduces in more detail the different tools used in this troubleshooting tutorial to be able to play God of War PC game well.

The tools used

DXVK extension

The tool is a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9/10/11 that allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine. Although designed for linux, it is currently used to run God of War PC on windows.

Msi AfterBurner

MSI Afterburner is the ultimate graphics card utility, developed by the Guru3D RivaTuner team. It is widely used to configure and improve the operation of machine graphics cards.

Outside the domain of video games, this utility is also used by data and machine learning scientists to improve computer performance.

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Conclusion

We have come to the end of this long post. I hope that the tips and tricks we have mentioned have been able to help you. This post will be developed over time for more adjustment, and even more trick to play this epic game.

The optimization tips are not only applicable on God of War PC game. You will be able to adapt these optimization tips to other games that are not running well on your PC.

While writing this post, I decided to invest in a desktop gamer to stop making my current laptop cry.

Research on external graphics cards did not convince me too much. Maybe you tell us in the comments (without advertising) your experience with external graphics cards.