King’s Bounty games are notorious for different render-oriented crashes, which is much worse than a problem with Windows 10/11 and modern graphic cards. The KB games use an ancient implementation of DirectX 9 API which can cause a lot of problems with current hardware.

But after searching the whole entirety of the Internet and 10+ years of posts about King's Bounty varied Direct3D crashes, I never found the ultimate fix…

...And then I remembered about DXVK.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, I will help to make your King’s Bounty up and running again

• Download DXVK pack from GitHUB[github.com] (the name of the archive - dxvk-2.3.1.tar.gz). You can unpack it with WinRAR or any other similar program.
  
  

  DXVK is a Linux-originated Vulkan API wrapper which translates DX calls through an efficient modern wrapper based on Vulkan libraries. It’s open-source, safe and free.

  
  
• Copy d3d9.dll from the x32 directory of the downloaded DXVK archive to your game folder (in my case it was - …/steamapps/common/King’s Bounty Crossworlds/)
  
• Forget the crashes and enjoy the game!

Yes! I ran my tests in King's Bounty Crossworlds in the mines of Montero (crashed EVERY TIME).

I tried everything from the Internet - similar crashes, absolutely nothing helps.

Then I tried to run the game with DXVK - no more crashes! Spend a few more hours in the game, set sail to different islands, entered ill-fated mines a few times, defeated the Driller boss, a bunch of regular enemies - the game is stable!

(I have AMD machine - RX 7600, Ryzen 3600X. Recent WHQL drivers - 24.3.1)

• Intro videos can refuse to play after launching the game. Press LMB to skip.
  
• Interface of the game may load before the rest of the screen when you load the game with DXVK for the first time. It happens only once to me, and it doesn't occur later.
  
• Some minor visual glitches possible (a few font bugs e.t.c). Nothing serious.

No more /BMRender/rmode.cpp crashes, black screens, driver timeouts. I was shocked no one on the whole Internet had actually tried it before. But I did. And it’s working!

King's Bounty is a great series of games and no technical difficulties should stop you from enjoying it.

I hope it helps!

Update 20/09/2025. It's been a long time since I made this guide for you, and multiple new DXVK builds have been released. As @Loo corrects in the comments, version 2.5 seems to have a specific fix for Warriors of the North, but 2.7.1 (the latest one available as I wrote this) seems to work fine as well. Nonetheless, if you experience crashes with any King's Bounty game on the latest DXVK build, please try to run older versions (2.5 seems to be stable or 2.3.1, which I tested myself). Good luck!