Sudden crashing in specific games - weird story (Nvlddmkm).

[xXLory96Xx]

Hello everyone and thanks for opening my post!

After New Year's day, I've been having weird crashes to desktop in Destiny 2 and Halo Infinite. Both would crash after some time, even though Halo Infinite crashes the fastest (not even 1 minute lol). I had many hours in these two games in the last 2 months, everything was perfect.

At first I thought those games were the problem because there's plenty of posts on the internet about them crashing. I though that maybe some update could have gone wrong. Devs, though, especially Bungie, don't recognize this as an issue of theirs.

For Halo and Destiny I tried EVERYTHING, reinstalling, disabling overlays, full screen opt, capping framerate, clean driver (3 different versions, actually) install with DDU and a lot more, while every other game works perfectly, like God Of War, Forza Horizon 5, GTA V, Doom Eternal, Ori and many indie games (and let's be honest, some of them are WAY more demanding than Destiny 2 and Halo).

Now, the weird part.

After so many hours of research and troubleshooting, I found a few people the same issues, because just like them I often (ye, not always) see this in the event viewer: "Nvlddmkm stopped responding but recovered". Some were complaining about Halo, some about Destiny (look for the Broccoli error), so I decided to contact two of them.

They have a very similar rig and having these issues only since New Year. One of them has i9 9900k, 2080 Ti and Maximus XI Hero. I have the exact same build, he has Win 11, while I'm running Win 10, but still, same build. I immediately found this curious.

Now, for Bungie it's absolutely fine to believe our graphics cards decided to break at the same time of the year and totally work fine in any other game, but there's no doubt something changed. I never checked this forum until now, and I saw a few people with Asus ROG motherboards, NVIDIA GPUs and high end Intel CPU's complaining about something very similar.

The only troubleshooting step I decided to skip is the BIOS Update, because I have one from 2019, which never gave me trouble so I was afraid of updating. Plus, I can't figure out how a BIOS update can help in games, because I used to believe that a BIOS can be stable or unstable, while crashes only in specific (in this case only 2) games were just a matter of software leaks. Now, I'm really having a lot of doubts.

Not running any OC on the GPU. i9 is at 4.9 GHz, so nothing special.

Is any of you aware of any recent Windows Update, or Nvidia Driver or who-knows-what that could cause display issues just in very specific games? Something that's causing any conflict with my hardware or with my BIOS? Maybe security enhancements or something similar? Not gonna lie, I'm a lil afraid of updating my BIOS, do you think it could help?

I just want to be sure there's no "well-known" issue I'm unaware of, while instead I'm looking in the wrong direction.

Thanks for reading, any help will be appreciated!

[OldManDan]

Can you post your full system configuration, including hard drives?
This isn't a new build, so there have been no recent hardware changes that line up with this? You've been playing these games fine and then this just started happening out of the blue?

Are you seeing any other warnings spamming event viewer? Nothing mentioning Microsoft-Windows-WHEA-Logger or PCI Express hardware failures?

[xXLory96Xx]

OldManDan wrote:
Can you post your full system configuration, including hard drives?
This isn't a new build, so there have been no recent hardware changes that line up with this? You've been playing these games fine and then this just started happening out of the blue?

Are you seeing any other warnings spamming event viewer? Nothing mentioning Microsoft-Windows-WHEA-Logger or PCI Express hardware failures?

Hello, thanks for answering!

Full build: i9 9900k "oc" at 4.9 GHz, 1.305v, Nvidia GF RTX 2080 Ti Factory OC, 16 GB Gskill Trident Z 3200 MHz, Corsair H150i cpu cooler, Samsung SSD 840 EVO, Samsung SSD 860 EVO, Samsung SSD 860 QVO, Western Digital HDD, Windows 10 fully updated, Corsair AX860

No, literally no hardware change. As I said I played both games flawlessly before New Year's and when I came back to my PC I was having issues in both. That's why I immediately thought Halo and Destiny were somehow broken, especially because I've seen a few people having the same issue. Now, Halo crashes almost immediately and this is what I found:

https://piunikaweb.com/2022/01/08/halo-infinite-memory-leak-issue-causing-crashes-or-low-performance....

What's weird, is that a very few people have this problem, so you can imagine when I made posts in their specific forums, the first (and only thing) that I've been told is that something's wrong in my system. When I found people having the same issues, I immediately felt relieved.

Everything we've done is here:
https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/260431942?page=0&sort=0&showBanned=0&path=1

Now, when's the last time you had two PCs not working properly in only two games, collectively at the same time?
I'm really out of ideas, so is my friend.

Also keep in mind that it's not a problem on the load of the GPU, because having maximum settings or minimum doesn't change a thing.

[xeromist]

How far back did you go with Nvidia drivers? Have you tried something really old, maybe middle of last year?

[xXLory96Xx]

xeromist wrote:
How far back did you go with Nvidia drivers? Have you tried something really old, maybe middle of last year?

Hello, thanks for answering!

Yeah not middle of last year, probably September, simply because both games were working fine with those drivers and the ones that came out with Forza Horizon 5, I recently updated them again only because of the issue I'm having now.

I had 496.49 and every game was working fine. Since the 4th of January, I had issues with those two games with the same driver.

Let me know what you think, I can also go further with older drivers, hoping they work with God of War or Horizon.

[xeromist]

I'd think older drivers would still work, they generally do, but might lack optimizations. But if you know for sure it was working with that driver then I don't see a reason to chase older drivers unless you have no other ideas.

You could look to see if there are any Windows Restore points around the time you started experiencing issues. That would indicate something was installed.