Black Screen and GPU Crash after a couple of jumps to another system

Tumama · Nov 28, 2021

I don't know if this is the right place to ask but I'm kinda desperate. If this belong somewhere else please feel free to move it.
I've been having this issue very recently (since last week when I upgraded my GPU drivers) and it's bugging me ever since, but since I'm only having this issue with Elite Dangerous, I'm starting to think it's not just my GPU that is at fault here.

I can boot and play the game just fine, as long as I stay within the same system. But after making a jump or two (most of the times is at the second jump), the game goes into a black screen while in witchspace (when it's loading the target system), then a full system crash, forcing me to do a hard reset.
After rebooting, the display adapter shows up as "disabled" in device manager.
After re-enabling it, I get a Code 31 in the Device Manager (driver unable to load).
After another reboot, GPU drivers seem to load normally.

Corrupted GPU drivers were my initial suspect, so I uninstalled and reinstalled my AMD GPU drivers with default factory settings. But the crashes are still happening.
Again, this is an issue that seems to be only happening with Elite. I had no black screen issues or driver timeouts with my other games.
My second guess is that there's something in the graphics configurations causing the crashes or even the game files itself.
I am open to suggestions. I don't wanna reinstall my drivers every time I make a jump.

My specs just in case:

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X 3.5GHs
AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB VRAM
32 GB RAM (can't remember speed)
250GB Kingston SSD (where the OS is installed)
1TB Kingston SSD (Odyssey installed)
AMD Radeon Software version 21.11.3 (latest to date)
Game version is the latest (update 8)

Morbad · Nov 28, 2021

Elite shouldn't be able to do anything that would result in the GPU drive failing to load after that first reboot. Frankly, neither should almost any other application.

During hyperspace jumps the game will dynamically render the system being loaded, which is a pretty demanding task. This could certainly be revealing issues that other games wouldn't, but still shouldn't be preventing drivers from loading upon boot.

Windows' event logs might reveal more information.

You could try disabling certain security features known to have incompatibilities with some non-WHQL drivers, or revert to older drivers. Either the ones you were using before, or the latest WHQL version (21.10.2) would be a good place to start.

I would also test the system for general stability, especially system memory...flaky memory can cause issues with almost anything, and apparent GPU problems is often where such issues first become apparent.

EdzUp · Nov 28, 2021

Download a 3d mark or other stress test software it does seem like your GPU is failing on a heavy load as Odyssey isn't optimised 100% it can thrash the GPU sometimes. This would only show up when something does the heavy load so most other optimised games would run fine

STRONTIUM DOG · Nov 28, 2021

could try deleting your gpuworktable.xml in your products folder that may help
also if you have a gpu tool like msi afterburner try downclocking its core clock using the slider 50mhz to see if that will steady the tdr

Tumama · Nov 29, 2021

STRONTIUM DOG said:
could try deleting your gpuworktable.xml in your products folder that may help
also if you have a gpu tool like msi afterburner try downclocking its core clock using the slider 50mhz to see if that will steady the tdr

This seems to fix it. Deleted the file, booted up the game again and it did the shaders load thing again.
I'm flying around Colonia, 5 hours of playing and around 15 jumps later and no GPU crashes yet.

Morbad · Nov 29, 2021

I'd still recommend some stability testing...even a completely corrupt shader cache/worktable shouldn't be able to cause the system to fail to load the GPU driver after a crash.

colprice2002 · Nov 29, 2021

Hi,
Glad you have a solution - I'd suggest monitoring your computer's PSU voltages...
Elite uses a lot of cpu and GPU capacity and it may just be hitting the limits of you PSU.

STRONTIUM DOG · Nov 29, 2021

its an odd old combo but it works

cheers!

Tumama · Dec 1, 2021

Morbad said:
I'd still recommend some stability testing...even a completely corrupt shader cache/worktable shouldn't be able to cause the system to fail to load the GPU driver after a crash.

I'm thinking it was because I was dumb and installed the non-signed drivers instead of sticking with the old version.
I will look into it.

colprice2002 said:
Hi,
Glad you have a solution - I'd suggest monitoring your computer's PSU voltages...
Elite uses a lot of cpu and GPU capacity and it may just be hitting the limits of you PSU.

It's weird. Never had this issue in 4 years of playing, not even with Odyssey installed and you know how poorly optimized was at the beginning.