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Common start up Problems and Solutions

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Andres
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If when you start Garry's Mod the screen is black - your display settings might be wrong.

Verifying Game Cache Integrity

Sometimes game files might get corrupted and a file verification is necessary.

If that doesn't work for some reason, you can do it manually:

  1. Open Steam
  2. Go to the "Library"
  3. Right-click on Garry's Mod
  4. Select "Properties" from the dropdown menu
  5. Open the "Local Files" tab
  6. Press "Verify Integrity Of Game Cache" button
  7. Wait for the process to finish

Now try to start up Garry's Mod again.

You can learn more about game cache verification here

Verify Team Fortress 2 and other mounted games, if any

Lately Team Fortress 2 started to cause problems with Garry's Mod.

If you have Team Fortress 2 installed, you should complete steps above for it, and any other installed Source Engine game as well.

Uninstall or exit programs that are known to cause problems

There are a few programs that may interfere with Garry's Mod and other Source Engine games, such as:

  • IOBit Malware Fighter
  • Any software that may contain Overlay functionality (mostly Voice Chat applications)
    • Discord Overlay
    • RivaTuner Statistics Server (aka MSI Afterburner)

It is advised to uninstall those programs or disable their Overlay functionality and try to launch the game again if you are having start up problems, such as black screen on start up.

If uninstalling is not an option, temporarily disable or exit the software before starting playing.

You could also try temporarily disabling any antivirus software you might have installed, as they may conflict with the game.

Failed to create D3D device!

Sometimes you may get this error on start up:

Failed to create D3D device!
Error 0x8876086A: D3DERR_NOTAVAILABLE: This device does not support the queried technique.

In this case your video card is incompatible with the game. Be aware that most new laptops come with two graphics processors and Garry's Mod may be using an internal one which is used for your display and video playback, etc to save on power.

To fix that you will need to force Garry's Mod to use your dedicated graphics processor. Steps for this depends on the manufacturer of your dedicated graphics card, you can find the information about this on their official website or on YouTube.

If that doesn't help, see "Forcing screen resolution" section below.

Couldn't Load Library 'x' (looking for interface y) (Windows)

Sometimes this error with popup when either one or more of your game files are missing or some other application installed some files into wrong directories. It is possible that some other symptoms or start up crashes can be fixed by this.

To fix this problem, you first should try Verifying Integrity of Game Cache. See above for steps to do that. If that doesn't help, keep reading.

In some cases, applications you install will put specific files that Garry's Mod uses into the Windows folder. In order to run Garry's Mod, those files must be deleted or renamed. Do not worry, this will not have any negative side effects on your PC or those applications.

To fix the problem, you should delete or rename the following files:

  • Awesomium.dll
  • bass.dll
  • steam_api.dll

In the following locations:

  • C:/Windows/System32/
  • C:/Windows/SysWOW64/

hl2.exe appears for a few seconds and then disappears

Some AMD graphics card users reported that enabling following setting in the control panel solved the issue for them:

  • Radeon App > Display > Enable Scale with GPU

The game freezes on "Finished" screen.

Sub-processes (like awesomium_process.exe) shouldn't be set to run as admin, symptoms can be anything awesomium related or just hangs during loading.

This will cause problems like The game freezing on "Finished" on the start up screen.

Setting Auto Config Mode

The -autoconfig launch option will allow Steam to configure Garry's Mod with the best settings for use on your machine.

  1. Open Steam
  2. Go to the "Library"
  3. Right-click the game which needs to be reconfigured
  4. Select "Properties" from the menu
  5. Click the "Set launch options..." button
  6. Remove any launch options currently shown
  7. Type -autoconfig in the box

After trying these steps you should repeat the steps and remove the -autoconfig setting.

Forcing windowed mode

Sometimes playing in a window can sole start up problems.

  1. Open Steam
  2. Go to the "Library"
  3. Right-click the game which needs to be reconfigured
  4. Select "Properties" from the menu
  5. Click the "Set launch options..." button
  6. Remove any launch options currently shown
  7. Type -sw in the box

Now Garry's Mod will run in a window instead of full screen. To undo this, simply repeat the steps and remove the -sw launch option.

Forcing screen resolution on start up

Sometimes forcing screen resolution when starting the game fixes startup problems.

This is known to fix black screen problems and "Failed to create D3D Device" error message.

In order to force Garry's Mod to use specific screen resolution, you must:

  1. Open Steam
  2. Right click on Garry's Mod and select Properties
  3. Press Set Launch Options and enter one of the launch options from the list below
  4. Press OK, and try to launch the game again

List of basic screen resolutions. Try one per each try, and remove anything you have added into the launch options if all tries are unsuccessful.

  • -w 800 -h 600
  • -w 1024 -h 768
  • -w 1280 -h 720
  • -w 1366 -h 768
  • -w 1920 -h -1080

You can also put any custom screen resolution ( or the screen resolution of your monitor ), the -w parameter starts for width, and -h for height, both in pixels. All parameters are separated with a space, for example:

  • -w 1280 -h 720 -window -noborder

It is also a good idea to put -window parameter in there to start the game in a window and a -noborder parameter to hide the border of the window.

Try forcing Garry's Mod to use proper DirectX versions (Windows)

Sometimes something might cause the game to load a different DirectX version. You can try to force Garry's Mod to load one of the "known to work" versions of DirectX:

  1. Open Steam
  2. Right click on Garry's Mod and select Properties
  3. Press Set Launch Options and enter one of the launch options from the list below
  4. Press OK, and try to launch the game again

List of supported DirectX values is as follows. Try one per each try, and remove anything you have added into the launch options if all tries are unsuccessful.

  • -dxlevel 90
  • -dxlevel 91
  • -dxlevel 95

Please note that DXLevel 81 might be unstable. DirectX 8 is not officially supported in Garry's Mod.

MacOS (OS X) Users

The minimal supported version of OS X for Garry's Mod is 10.6.3.

Try running the game without addons

Sometimes you may get to the main menu and crash there. The most likely cause for such crashes are addons. Often extracting addon after downloading it may result in a crash.

You should try running the game without addons. To do so follow the following steps:

  1. Open Steam
  2. Go to the "Library"
  3. Right-click the game which needs to be reconfigured
  4. Select "Properties" from the menu
  5. Click the "Set launch options..." button
  6. Remove any launch options currently shown
  7. Type -noaddons -noworkshop in the box

This will safely disable all addons on your Garry's Mod copy without deleting or otherwise affecting the addon files. To disable this, simply remove -noaddons -noworkshop from your launch options.

  • -noaddons disables all folder (Legacy) addons
  • -noworkshop disables all Steam Workshop addons

It is also possible that simply waiting for all addons to finish downloading in the main menu and restarting the game will fix crashing problems while loading into servers or singleplayer.

Crashing while playing the game

Some mods or game servers require a lot of Video RAM, turning down "Texture Detail" in the Advanced Video Options can help with crashing during gameplay or loading. "Very high" texture detail is highly not recommended for RP servers.

TL, DR; Nothing above helps & contacting us

Before contacting us, please try to do as much as possible to solve the problem yourself. If you do contact us, please tell us what exactly have you tried. And please don't tell us that "I tried everything, help me". List everything you have tried.

Please include as much information as possible, including crash logs. You can lean where to find them on the bottom of this page:

http://wiki.garrysmod.com/page/Crash_Reporting

It is vital for us to get as much information as humanly possible about your issue and what you have tried to answer and solve the problem faster and more efficiently.

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