Unreal Engine 4 causing nVidia Driver to stop working

It has only started happening recently and I’m not sure why, nVidia’s drivers were updated around a week ago however this only started I’d say around 4-5 days ago. Nothing on my system has changed since it has started happening everything has stayed the same so I’m not sure what is causing it. When it happens it causes my GPU to speed up rapidly also (this I think is happening as I have a driver that increases the fan speed depending on the heat of the GPU Core).

It appears to happen most of the time when I am building lighting. (Yes, I’m using importance volumes and I’m only building light at preview standard).

I know it isn’t a problem with the card it’s self as it runs other high performance games on max settings such as BF4 with ease and with no crashing.

My hardware is not under the minimum requirements either:

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit

GPU: GTX 660Ti

CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K Ivy Bridge running at 3.4GHz

RAM: 8GB

HDD: 2TB 7200RPM Drive (only 1TB used)

If it’s mostly happening while you build your lights then your system has overheating issues. Lightmass uses the CPU while building the lights so there must be an overall heat issue in the case if it is affecting the graphics card too when you are not building the lights.

Look!!

I’ve GTX 770 OC and it’s screaming while dealing with UE4.
it’s ok, it never crashed before.

but beware…driver stop working may happened bec. Overheat , try to use HWiNFO64.exe to check the temp of your GPU to be clear it’s not a heat issue… it should be around “60-70C”

finally , windows 7 just have been updated yesterday , it may the new windows update need to check your GPU driver to latest version .

yesterday my machine crashed “BOSD” while building the light , I updated my bios to be sure everything run smoothly , and now everything runs clear.

so my advice is:
1-check your GPU Driver.
2-update your motherboard Bios.

bec. I think that this issue is a “Driver software/hardware related” not related to UE4 editor .

just check those 2 solution and then confirm what you get .

best of luck :))

Hi,

I tested what you said and I don’t think it’s an overheat problem. Like I said everything was fine until the past 5 days or so.

Also everything is up to date

CPU Temp: 52-61C
GPU Temp: 62-76C

What about the north bridge of the motherboard and the PSU? Also what kind of crash are you getting? Is it giving you the blue screen or is Windows just telling you that driver crashed?

if you using Nividia beta driver go back to the last official WHQL driver.
beta driver reported as it’s buggy with UE4

That could be the cause, I’ll get back to you on that.

That’s not it, I have the last official WHQL Driver installed.

Also, it BSOD’s with BC Code: 116 and I’ve noticed it often does it when opening a map also.

if you got a BSOD
download bluescreen viewer application …it’s an application that can read the dump file created by system when a BSOD happened.

you will see then what driver that cause the BSOD for your case!

best of luck

Well, after starting to use UE4.3, I am having this problem as well. :frowning: But for me it happens randomly.
I rolled back my driver, and it is still happening.

My graphic card is a GTX 460M.

Same problem here.

20567-rig.png

This has been happening since 4.1… and is still happening in 4.5, and only with Unreal, not with any games.
And only when I run the game in editor, launching, full screen windowed, doesn’t matter, it crashes my GPU after a few minutes… always, I had to turn down the display settings, and then it runs a little longer, I can not test like this… Especially with terrain, I can only paint in LOW res mode… and it still crashes after a while… Everything is up to date, won’t be able to use the engine like this for much longer, as soon as my mobile games are done, I may have to switch back to Unity…

Does this happen in all projects, or just in one game?

Have you tested to see if the problem is heat-related? Your computer seems powerful enough, but it’s something to check anyway.

Hi Jonathan, yeah it’s happening in all projects, but , I have not ported my other two 4.4 games, to 4.5, as they have been released and published, and not required changes yet. My new game is pure 4.5, and NVIDIA has been dishing out a lot of drivers lately, I got the latest one again yesterday, and I built for Windows 64, played in full screen and in game, and it didn’t happen once…

It is a bit intermittent, I can put some heat gauges on, and have a look see, what the GPU and CPU temperatures look like.

Ok, now I dunno… I updated NVIDIA driver yesterday, and have not had any crashes. Recorded about 5 minutes of gameplay in full screen ( 1920 x 1080 ) , with max scalability settings … yay!!!

It’s possible that a recent driver was causing the issue, and the frequent driver updates you mentioned were to fix that issue. Let me know if the problem resurfaces. Until then, I’m marking this as Resolved.