Black screen on startup

[Zachc12385]

Hello I've been having issues trying to get DCS to run. I run the launcher and press start game then all i get is a black screen. I did a repair and deleted the old options.lua in the config folder as well as fxo and metashaders. For some reason when I open an app for example Nvidia control panel is runs like normal. I'll attach a log as well just lmk if its the right one. thank you!

dcs.log

[Zachc12385]

P.S I also get crashes when quitting a mission sometimes as well

Crash log for crash on mission exit

dcs.log-20250525-215045.zip

[sleighzy]

EDIT: See my last point I added re: the dxgi.dll in the bin-mt dir, I only just spotted that. Remove it (which the repair with remove files should do anyway, but do it yourself first to ensure it's not conflicting with the latest DLSS changes).

 

The DCS log analyzer shows this for your crashes:

Your DCS has crashed

The crash occurred inside VCRUNTIME140.dll.

• Try a slow repair of the game, selecting the option to remove files.
• Delete Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\fxo and metashaders2 and try again.,
• Next, delete %LOCALAPPDATA%\TEMP\DCS.openbeta and try again.,
• Next, try renaming Saved Games\DCS.openbeta to DCS.old and try again.

The VCRUNTIME140.dll issue is also mentioned below in the DxDiag report. I'd recommend downloading and installing/repairing your Windows C++ distributables. You want the vc_redist.x64 version from here.  Latest supported Visual C++ Redistributable downloads | Microsoft Learn

Note that this is not a gaurantee, but just to rule it out.

 

From the DxDiag report in that crash zip. Notice also the reference to VCRUNTIME again.

Windows Error Reporting (WER)

Application Errors

DCS.exe: was hung for 60.78s and killed, was hung for 35.79s and killed, was hung and killed, c0000005 (VCRUNTIME140.dll)

Microsoft Update / Store issues

• Make sure you have enough free disk space.,
• Run SFC and DISM to check your Windows.,
• Run wsreset.exe to reset the Microsoft Store cache,
• .- Run the Windows Troubleshooter and select Windows Update.

 

For the SFC and DISM commands you want to open a command prompt as administrator and run the below two commands separately, then restart your PC.

dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

sfc /scannow

 

Additional items from the log analyzer:

• Disable game mode
• Disable Hardware Accelerated GPU scheduling
• Disable Core Isolation

You have another copy of the dxgi.dll in your bin-mt directory. I know of only two reasons for this. Remove it and see what happens as well.

You should also run DCS from the bin directory and not the bin directory as bin-mt will be removed in the future. Both bin and bin-mt are multithreaded now.

Edited Monday at 02:46 AM by sleighzy

[Zachc12385]

Thank you. I’ll try all of the above starting with deleting dxgi.dll and create a new shortcut for DCS via bin as opposed to bin-mt. Not sure why I’m having the windows issue. I have plenty of space and just updated windows a few days ago. Only thing I changed was unparking my cpu cores but the issue was happening prior to that as well. Thanks again and I’ll post again with my results

[sleighzy]

10 minutes ago, Zachc12385 said:

Not sure why I’m having the windows issue. I have plenty of space and just updated windows a few days ago.

Yeah, can't comment on that one too much, just something it pulled out of the DxDiag report along with general recommendations that could resolve that. The DxDiag contains the last 10 Windows system errors so don't know if it's in there since the Windows update or not.

When did the black screen start occurring, just since the last DCS update, or since that and has fine up until today? Any other changes around the same time this started happening? Was happening before or just after the Windows update? Just trying to nail down a timeline for anything that could have changed in your system.

[Zachc12385]

I stopped playing for a few months. Moved to a new place and finally got the sim setup and its just been running funny. The game runs fine its just getting to the point of actually playing it that's the issue. I'm currently doing a slow repair and did the sfc and dism. I deleted the dxgi.dll and I suspect that its there because i had bin-mt pinned to task bar and every time i booted up DCS it was running bin-mt.

[Zachc12385]

Testing out DCS now. No more black screen on bootup. Here's everything that i did

• Removed dxgi.dll from bin-mt
• Booted from bin not bin-mt
• Disabled game mode
• Disabled Hardware Accelerated GPU scheduling
• Disabled Core Isolation
• Ran SFC and DISM commands
• Ran wsreset.exe
• Deleted %LOCALAPPDATA%\TEMP\DCS.openbeta
• Ran slow repair

Thank you for your help once again. If I have any more issues relating to this kind of boot up/crash problem I'll leave an additional post.

Hope this helps anyone out there with similar issues.

 

[sleighzy]

No worries. It's quite possibly the dxgi.dll that was causing the issue. This doesn't ship with DCS so people put it there (automatically sometimes) when using ReShade, or DLSSTweaks for overriding presets. I'm assuming this is how it ended up in yours as well. May have conflicted with the Windows one and what DCS is depending on for it's graphics libraries.  ....or something else

Anyway, glad you're all sorted. Happy flying!

Edited Monday at 05:44 AM by sleighzy