Anno 117 Crashing With a 'd3d12' Error? Yeah, You're Not Alone.
It's launch day for Anno 117: Pax Romana, and what's a new PC launch without a game-breaking, soul-crushing crash?
I'm seeing the reports flood in. You've got a brand-new, high-end rig—a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, an RTX 4090, 32 gigs of RAM—and your game is still collapsing to the desktop with a "D3D12 error" almost every hour.
It's infuriating. You're losing progress, and your beast of a machine is getting humbled by a city builder.
This is a classic DirectX 12 problem, and it's plagued other games like Black Myth Wukong and Hunt: Showdown. The good news is that this is almost certainly a launch-day optimization problem that Ubisoft will have to patch, ASAP.
But you don't want to wait. You want to build Rome now. So, here are the fixes, from the simplest to the most extreme.
The 'Duh' List (Nuke Your Drivers)
This is the most common fix, and the error message itself usually points to it.
Do a Clean Driver Install: Don't just click "update" in your NVIDIA/AMD software. Download the latest driver for your GPU. During the installation, look for a checkbox that says "Perform a clean installation". This nukes your old settings and can solve a ton of conflicts.
Update Windows: I know, I know. But do it. That generic support email from the Age of Empires team had it as their first step for a reason manually].
Disable Overlays: This is a big one. Disable the NVIDIA GeForce Experience overlay, the AMD overlay, the Discord overlay, everything. They are notorious for hooking into games and causing DX12 to have a meltdown.
The 'Weird Voodoo' Fixes
If the simple stuff fails, it's time to get weird.
Run as Administrator: Find the Anno 117 .exe file, right-click it, and select "Run as administrator." One Hunt player said this temporarily fixed their D3D12 crash.
Delete the Shader Cache: This is a classic. Find the Anno 117 shader cache folder (it's probably in your
Documents\Anno 117orAppDatafolder), and just delete the whole thing. Then, verify your game files through Ubisoft Connect or Steam. This forces the game to rebuild its shaders from scratch.Disable Cloud Sync: This is a long shot, but sometimes cloud sync services like OneDrive or iCloud can mess with a game's ability to read/write files, causing a crash. Disable them.
The 'Oh God, It's My Hardware' Fix
This is the one that'll sting, but it's also the most likely to work, especially on high-end 4090s and 7900 XTXs.
That "D3D12 Device Removed" error means your "GPU to crash or hang!". This often happens when a game is pushing your card so hard that its factory overclock becomes unstable. Yes, even if your card is "brand new" and "perfectly fine" in every other game.
The fix? Manually underclock your GPU.
I know, it sounds insane. You paid for the whole clock, you want to use the whole clock. But a tiny 5-10% performance hit is better than crashing every hour.
For NVIDIA (RTX 4090): Get MSI Afterburner. Drop the "Core Clock" by -200MHz. See if it's stable. If not, try dropping it even more.
For AMD (RX 7900 GRE): Go into your Adrenalin software. Set the max GPU clock to -200MHz. If that doesn't work, one user reported that -400MHz was the magic number that finally made their game stable.
Also, if you're running any of your own undervolts or overclocks, disable them immediately. Return everything to default settings.
The Last Resort
If none of that works, you've got two options.
Roll Back Your Driver: Sometimes the latest driver is the problem. Try installing a version from a few months ago.
Reinstall the Game: Nuke the entire thing from your drive and do a fresh install.
If you're still crashing, then the problem is the game. It's a launch-day build, and the DX12 implementation is clearly borked for some hardware. All we can do is submit our crash reports and pray to the Ubisoft gods for a hotfix.