Desktop installations face challenges, including screen lockups in specific games.
Desktop installations face challenges, including screen lockups in specific games.
My computer is experiencing problems lately. It crashes to the desktop or freezes during gameplay, requiring a taskkill to close. I’ve also noticed it shuts down completely without any bluescreen, only during certain games. Games like Elite Dangerous (mostly crashes to desktop), Gears of War 4 (frequent freezes), Minecraft singleplayer without mods, and Halo: MC have these issues. However, some titles such as Satisfactory, Rimworld, Bloons, and TD 6 run smoothly. It’s becoming increasingly frustrating with these interruptions. Normally I can stream YouTube, Netflix, or play Discord without issues. I’ve updated my graphics drivers and re-seated the GPU, but it still doesn’t work. I’m using Windows 11 with an i7-12700K processor, Arctic Freezer 2 240mm, and an MSI Z690 edge with an SSD and HDD. I also use GSKILL Trident, Gigabyte Gaming OC 3, and an 80+ Gold PSU. I have both SSD and HDD, and games have crashed on both.
Visit the latest NVIDIA driver page. After saving the file, launch DDU in safe mode. Adjust the settings to enable safe mode prompt and ensure "prevent Windows update from installing drivers" is active. Restart the application and select safe mode with network. Follow the instructions in DDU to install the drivers. Once done, restart your system and test the games. For additional help, refer to the download link provided.
I’d also check other factors. Remove the latest Windows update before issues began, refresh chipset drivers, take off unused drives from games and move them to the main system drive to reduce problems. Turn off background services such as Discord, as both Factorio and Elden Ring stop working with it running. Use web Discord instead. You might also cap power draw at your 3090 model, since it tends to spike high; this should prevent crashes rather than just game freezes, pointing more toward a software problem. Consider running the SFC and DSM cleanup to refresh system files, as corrupt files are more common now with NVMe and SSDs than with older HDDs. Memory cells can fail and replace themselves, eventually exhausting spare cells and causing failures.
sfc refers to System File Corruption, while dsim stands for Disk System Information. These terms appear in Event Viewer logs showing the GameInput Service terminated due to a newer storage version. It seems most of these games run on the same drive, but one is using an SSD that hasn’t been used there before.