Steam F1 2010 & Dirt 2 both crash on startup

This is getting really annoying now and I can't understand what the problem is. Both these games crash in exactly the same way on startup, leaving me with no input from the keyboard and just a black screen. About 1 in every 5 attempts the game will load successfully.

Both games being made by Codemasters, I was wondering if there was a known fix for this? I don't have any problem with any of my other games on Steam.

Cheers.

 

try (re)installing games for windows live

iirc thats what gave me the problems you're talking about

 

Hmm, cheers but that doesn't seem to have solved it.

 

When the screen's black try ALT-Tabbing out and back, that may do it.

 

It seems to be DX11 related. If I go into the game folder for each of these games and open the hardware settings file in notepad, I can change the settings to read:

ForceDX9 = true rather than ForceDX9 = False.

By running the games in DX9 mode they play fine, but they also look really bad. My GPU drivers are all up to date.

 

install blue ripple audio drivers, should fix ya...

 

When Steam was loading Dirt 2 for the first time it said that it had successfully installed the blue ripple audio drivers.