PC Steam - Random Blackscreen crash

Win11, AMD Ryzen 5 5600x, AMD RX6800 with 24.7.1 drivers, 32GB RAM. PBO on the CPU, No OC on the card. New character, single player.

The game has crashed twice on me in the last couple days, each with different conditions before the crash. This makes giving reproduction steps a bit difficult. Also, since my screen goes black, the GPU fans ramp to 100%, and the system seems to hang, I’m not sure if the baked in crash reporter is sending stuff before I hard reboot.

The first crash was right when a scripted dialogue started playing and I was walking around. The dialogue continued for a few seconds before I hard rebooted.

The second crash happened as I was working on building a base after destroying the first FNIX base you come across. I had already built quite a bit, and had played for a number of hours before the game crashed.

In both instances I end up having to re-enable the graphics card in windows and reinstall the graphics driver. On the second instance, I had to dump and reinstall USB root hubs because one was erroneously claiming a power surge repeatedly.

I remember having a similar problem before when I first got the game, but that seemed to go away with game and driver updates and I have completed the game at least once in the past. Could be an unstable driver from AMD.

I’m going to try to play again after a steam verify files, DDU wipe and reinstall of graphics software, and a 20 minute burn in on the GPU thru OCCT. I’ll report back.

Figured I’d get a thread started just in case anyone else has an inexplicable crash. Some collab might narrow down the root cause.

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This and some other symptoms sound like a serious hardware issue.

A game in general doesn’t affect windows settings, drivers and so on.

That’s the thing that has me scratching my head while I’m staring at the 360+ hours Steam is telling me I’ve played this game over the years.

OCCT reports no errors and nothing overheated which ended up being a 30 minute burn in test on the GPU. I decided recently to replay GZ to check out the updates. I was playing other games beforehand without issue, and still play other games without issue.

Windows will disable a device sometimes if it detects a problem, at least from what I’ve read in a number of places.

The USB power surge thing is a bit of a mystery since I have no high draw USB devices connected, and it goes away once I remove the USB root hubs and let windows reinstall them on reboot. And it only did that on the second crash instance. But there is a USB-C connection on the card itself, which I don’t use. Perhaps it crashes so hard that that USB-C gets stuck in an error state. Dunno. Maybe a full power off state would also clear the surge error.

I have yet to play GZ more.

Ok, another crash to report. Played for about 30 minutes before things went dark.

Game crashed, computer auto rebooted but came back without video signal. I even logged into windows without video. Did a hard shutdown with the power button, then hit the switch on my power supply for 30 seconds.

Power supply back on, fired up computer and video was back. Got a notification that card settings were reverted to default after the crash and found that Smart Access Memory had disabled itself. It also reset my fan curve for the card, but that’s inconsequential. As I said previously, there’s no overclock on the card. Didn’t have to reinstall or re-enable anything this time. So…progress I guess?

SFC and chkdsk ran in windows, nothing.

Ran another 30 minute OCCT stability test, this time CPU/RAM/GPU combined. SAM off. No problem.

I’m going to leave Smart Access Memory off for now and retry playing to see if it crashes. It’s a variable which doesn’t provide THAT much uplift in performance.

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Played last night for a good bit of time without issue. Fired up the game today and it ran for under an hour before a crash.

Here it seems to be a different problem, but it also happened in a game that had the sound settings of Windows (5.1 at the time) and the game only had standard 2 speakers, which caused the graphics card to cause a black screen and the PC ran without it Problems could only be solved by pressing the reset button.