This solved for me the issue, that's why i want to share it with the community.

For a lot of people with a new and powerful graphics card, the game, strory mode, or multiplayer crashes and freezes when try to play it.

Solution 1:

Disable game overlays.

This game hates ingame overlays, so your graphic card in-game overlay, makes the game or multiplayer crash, and that's why many people can not even run the game at all.
If you have an NVIDIA GPU, try to turn off the In-Game Overlay on NVIDIA GeForce Experience application (GeForce Experience > Settings > In-Game Overlay). For other types graphic cards, please check the settings of your graphic card application, to find and turn off the in-game overlay. If you have trubles to find it, pleas check the graphic card manual, or conact the official manufactor support, to provide you with the information, where to find that option. If you are using any other overlays, like discord overlay or any other, just turn it off, when your wanna play this game.


Solution 2:

If disabling your game overlay don't help then try this.

- Go to your Assassins Creed 4 Black Flag game folder (Steam\Steamapps\Common\Assassins Creed IV Black Flag)
- Right click AC4BFSP.exe
- Select Properties
- Select Compatibility
- Under "Run this program in compatibility mode for"
- Choose "Windows 95"
- If running it in Windows 95 compatibility mode doesn't work, other users have reported success selecting a different option from the list.


Solution 3:

change the Afinity of the AC4BFSP.exe on the Task Manager.

Change the affinity for the AC4BFSP.exe in the task manager and add or remove (uncheck) some of the CPUs.
1. Start the game.
2. Alt+Tab out and launch Task Manager
3. find AC4BFSP, right click and select "goto details".
4. right click on the process again and select "Set Afinity"
5. deselect or select as many of the CPU's you want. try to run the game with different amount CPU's, till the game works fine for you.

My guess is the problem is caused by a CPU bottleneck because it's and old game and doesn't know how to manage so many cores or just runs by mistake just with one core.

There is free programs that you can use, to automatically do this each time AC BF is running. This app is called "Automation Workshop" and there are instructions online and youtube, to show you how to automate setting of the affinity for a specific executable (it will detect when it runs and change the number of CPUs).


Solution 4:

Issue with freezes.

For many people, it solves also the issue with the freezes, just with changing the Anti-Aliasing graphic settings. Just try another option and most of the case it will solve the issue with freezes. If you tried all Anti-Aliasing options and it still freezes, just try to change any other graphic settings option, till you find the right graphic settings that work and makes you can play the game smoothly. I would recomend to turn off physx particles & vsync and change shadows settings from smoot shadows to a lower option.


Please leave a like and comment if this guide helped you too, to increase the chance that this guide will be found by more players with the same issue.

feel free to jion my AC4 mutliplayer goup, if you also enjoy to play the old multipayer https://steamproxy-script.pipiskins.com/groups/AC-IV-MP

Kind regards from MsMedusa86