Any UE4 version freezes computer

No driver/software updates in past two weeks, nothing is allowed to auto-update on my computer.
today all of a sudden ue4 freezes my computer after flying around a while in the editor.

I have tried 4.10, 4.11, 4.12 with 4.11 giving me the longest time before freezing.
I have tried binary and source, on brand new hdd’s and ssd’s, cleaned cache’s, re-installs, after formatting, lowering the engine settings, a variety of projects, maps, levels, content. after 2 - 10 minutes ue4 freezes my computer.

Loading high end 3dsmax scenes with gazillions of polygons on thousands and thousands of meshes, lighting going on, filling up my 32 gb of ram, playing doom, witcher, FO4 on ultra all work like a charm, no lags, no stutters, all nice and smooth.

I have chkdsk-ed all my drives, did I/O stress tests, memtests, dxdiags, make windows 10 check for errors, defragmentations, ssd advanced optimizations, checked for faulty wires, 3dmarked, prayed to cthulhu, shaked my fist in the air, went trough a whole day worth of event viewer (all volume healthy), reset the cmos battery, told my gf, got frustrated, and now posting it on this answerhub thread, knowing that either people suggest all the stuff I already tried after 12+ hours of almost non-stop trying to solve this, or that nothing will result in a clear answer on why this happens.

Without ue4 I cant finish my content for my clients… and that results in… quite some money loss.
So… yea… halp?

link text

Today… after reinstalling windows (F*** yes…)
I finally managed to get a crash report:

LogD3D11RHI:Error: Direct3DDevice->CreateBuffer(&Desc,pInitData,VertexBufferResource.GetInitReference()) failed
at D:\Build++UE4+Release-4.12+Compile\Sync\Engine\Source\Runtime\Windows\D3D11RHI\Private\D3D11VertexBuffer.cpp:75
with error DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED

As I dont have any clue on what # the submitted error report will be, I will add the crash log dumps here as well:

link text

Also a warning log in the windows error log that never showed up before:
“Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.”

Ok, paragon also freezes and gives me a crashreport.
link text

Hello,

  • Please provide the logs from your project’s Saved->Logs folder after the crash occurs.
  • Please cause the crash again, and provide your Machine ID from the Crash Reporter window so that I can look up the crash on our end.

Thanks!

Thanks for the information. Once I get the logs and Machine ID, I’ll be able to investigate further.

My intial suspicions lead me to believe that the issue lies within your graphics card drivers. You may even need to update your display link drivers as well, which you can find information about here: Crash in 4.8 - Platform & Builds - Unreal Engine Forums

hey Sean,

thanks for checking it all out.
I have already tried older and newer nvidia driver to no avail.
Oldest drivers I tried are from august 2015, newest are from a few days ago.

Reading up on the linked post atm, while trying to see if ue4 crashes when its minimized.

I dont have any hardware that uses the display link stuff, but installed it anyways just in case.

Waiting for ue4 to crash again so I can share the machine ID & logs.

MachineId:BE3D0BE2401B6607D1C5D59AA996F815

The SSDLogs are from the elemental demo installed on ssd, doing an HDD version now, just in case.

link text

And the crashlog from the version on HDD

Note: crashes occur anywhere between 1 and 5 times of me playing the elemental demo, or about 5-15 minutes of having the editor open, on both hdd and ssd.

link text

I can now verify that its not my gpu, as the same crash occurs when ue4 is run on my cpu instead.

this makes the crashes imho even weirder, as no other software causes this.

log will be uploaded shortly.

link text

Not really a “solved” but lowering my gpu core speed about 30% did reduce the crashes, cant tell for sure if its a permanent solution or not.

Well… solution…
Not really useful to force the gpu to run 30% slower just because ue4 likes to freeze all the things.

Prior to reducing gpu speed by 30%:
On a side-note, I did notice that when I have the ue4 viewport with the outline/content browser/etc set as stock (docked, etc) the time it takes to crash is way lower, than closing those tabs.

with tabs : 5-10 runs of elemental before crash.
without the tabs: 1-5 runs of elemental before crash.

Hello Luos,

After further investigation, we are unable to reproduce this issue on our end. It appears that the error you are getting is related to an issue with the graphics card, based on this line found in your logs: LogD3D11RHI:Error: DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED failed

Device Removed errors indicate that your graphics device has been physically removed, turned off, or a driver upgrade has occurred. This can happen occasionally, but your game or app should recreate device resources.

Take a look at this page from Microsoft, as it goes into a bit more depth regarding these errors and gives some suggestions on how to look into resolving them: Handle device removed scenarios in Direct3D 11 - UWP applications | Microsoft Docs

Have a great day

hey Sean,
I threw a few hundred bucks at it, without any proper results but a decent story.

pc went trough some ridiculous testing at one of the highly respected dutch computer stores, every piece of hardware was tested, the software was checked, more stress tests, and quite a few diagnose-focused programs where thrown at it.

Nothing was wrong with the hardware, the cpu, gpu, mobo, psu, hdd’s, ssd’s, m.2.'s all are working fine.
The temperatures never exceeded 42 degrees Celsius on any of the hardware, no faulty wiring, no strange voltage spikes, nothing.
Driver-wise, everything was in order, nothing was interfering, no faulty drivers, no virusses, no trojans, no software running on the background that could result in the crashes.

Literally the ONLY culprit was ue4. (and any ue4 game)

After discussing it with the tech guys the only reasoning they could find was that it might be due to a certain combination of gpu/mobo/win10/whatever drivers resulting in ue4 triggering something that makes either the engine or another driver think it needs to disable itself or at least tell other software its disabled crashing ue4 my pc in the process.

The thing is, as I, nor the tech-peeps know which driver/drivers is/are the culprit there isnt much of a definitive answer on what exactly its causing it.
It can go as far as an exact list of drivers installed on the exact combination of hardware that I have. what I do know for certain is that ue4 is the trigger to the crashes, but the black powder might be something else.
So we tested some more.

We tried installing the same gpu, with a variety of drivers but the crashes remained, same with other gpu’s, new ram, installing ue4 on a new ssd, to the point where we had two computers next to each other running the elemental demo (trust me, ive seen elemental demo so often I can pinpoint all the mistakes and oddities in that thing with my eyes closed) and only this rig is crashing.
(Note, other computer wasnt a 1:1 of my own rig, as not all hardware was available in the store)

The last thing we tested was to swap out my M.2. SSD (which has a clean win10 install + latest updates) and place another one in, with a fresh installed win7 with all updates.

no crashes.

but after formatting that new M.2. and installing win10 + all updates, the crashes started once more untill the gpu was downclocked to 70% of its power again.

so… the closest to a definitive answer we can get is “Any ue4, plus Win10, plus potentially a 1:1 setup of my hardware & their (close to) latest drivers”

I just hope that by the time I get my hands on a 1080TI, the right win10 drivers have been updated and that this joke of a clusterbleep stops crashing my rig.

Hey Sean, so it was my hardware and not ue4 right?

I bought a new 800 euro gpu because I honestly started to think it was my gpu.

Hi Luos.

The issue referenced in the blog post that we are investigating didn’t begin to occur until the 4.14 release in November 2016. We have no reason to suspect that any prior GPU failures were influenced by the engine.

Cheers