Semi-Crash/Black Screen when running Steam games after driver update
Posted by groovy_tacocat@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 6 comments
I updated my GPU drivers yesterday/today to 580.88 then started running into an issue where it seems like any steam game I run within 5-10 mins causes a semi-crash. By this I mean that both my monitors go black and I can still hear audio from like discord/the game but no one can hear me talk. When I press keys on the keyboard sometimes I'll hear like sounds that Windows will make or w/e but sometimes not and the only thing that can be done afterwards is to power the PC off then power back on.
I rolled my drivers back to a previous version but now the issue still appears, I've tried rolling back to older versions going all the way back to December of '24 to no avail. I have also used DDU to uninstall and reinstall an older previously working driver but the issue persisted.
I updated my BIOS and everything appeared to be working fine/as normal after opening a couple games and playing them for ~10mins or so each.
I came back to my PC within an hour or two later and on wake up the screen was back to the blackout for both monitors and after power cycling the issue has returned.
I have checked the GPU to make it's seated firmly/properly and that the cables are all plugged in properly as well.
My specs:
OS: Win 11
Mobo: Asus ROG STRIX Z690-A GAMING WIFI D4
CPU: i9-12900KS
GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 3090Ti
Nvidia Driver: Studio Driver - 572.83 (Currently)
Not overclocking or undervolting any components (if relevant)
Scary_Arrival_5836@reddit
Did the fix this issue?
groovy_tacocat@reddit (OP)
lol no there was no fix. I ended up talking to Customer Support for Nvidia/my GPU manufacturer and they both confirmed that essentially it was a hardware failure and it was out of warranty
d00m0@reddit
Hey there! Sorry to hear about this.
While I cannot confirm this is related to your specific problem, Microsoft is aware of an ongoing problem with Windows 11 24H2 where devices (often graphics card) become unresponsive in use, for some users in some specific cases such as playing games. The fix is scheduled to roll out on second Tuesday of August after it's gone through some additional testing. The fixed update is available as optional now (preview version) but full stability cannot be guaranteed yet. It's highly recommended to install August patches once they're available, and see if the update will fix the problems if you are experiencing them.
[FIX: Stability issue] This update addresses an issue observed in rare cases after installing the May 2025 security update and subsequent updates causing devices to experience stability issues. Some devices became unresponsive and stopped responding in specific scenarios.
Subsequent updates in this case mean June and July 2025 updates. So these started happening since May but June and July updates escalated the problem further. The stability problems include: games randomly crashing PCs, Windows taskbar freezes, incorrect Windows Firewall events, and FPS drops and performance hits in games.
Source: Windows Latest, PCWorld
In the meantime, there are some workarounds that people have reported to work. These include:
groovy_tacocat@reddit (OP)
Thank you for the reply!
Unfortunately I have tried all of these and the issue still occurs.
I have now also rebooted into my Linux drive and the same thing happens in Ubuntu 24.04 so at this point I’m starting to assume something is bad with the card itself
user_potat0@reddit
Try to retrieve event viewer logs or windows dumps and see if there's anything useful that you can pastebin, I'll look over tomorrow morning
groovy_tacocat@reddit (OP)
Not particularly experienced at auditing Event Viewer, however this pastebin is all warnings/criticals/errors that occurred in the ~15 minutes leading up to the semi-crash and afterwards