Black screen on game launch? Try disabling Nvidia GeForce Experience overlay

[DakkaDakkaDakka]

After installing the recent 4.701b hotfix, I found I was having trouble getting my game to launch successfully. I would click the red "Play" button, only for the game client to hang on a black screen, usually showing just a few words of text at the top, or maybe a portion of of the red loading bar, but it would never load.

 

This only happened when I was trying to launch the game using a resolution different than my monitor's native resolution. (For better spotting, I use 1920x1080 resolution on my 27" monitor, as opposed to the monitor's native 3840x2160, which at the 27" screen size makes spotting significantly worse with no meaningful improvement in image quality). The game would launch completely fine at the native 3840x2160 resolution, but as soon as I changed it to 1920x1080, it would hang on launch every time.

 

It took me a lot of testing to figure out what the issue was, but after reading some posts here, eventually I tried disabling the Nvidia GeForce Experience overlay (I just went into the overlay and disabled the HUD components that I'd been using to track FPS), and this did the trick; perfect launch every time at the 1920x1080 resolution.

 

I don't pretend to understand why this overlay causes a problem for IL-2 when launching at non-native resolution, but I'm sharing the tip anyways, in hopes it may help some other poor soul struggling with the same issue.

Edited December 15, 2021 by DakkaDakkaDakka