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6900xt crashes with raytracing enabled

Soldato
Joined
26 Sep 2017
Posts
6,192
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In the Masonic Temple
Hello there

I have been experiencing a unique problem, probably applicable to any 6 series amd card.
If raytracing is enabled i get games freezing and crashing to desktop.

So far i have tried

cold war single player
Modern warfare single player
Control
Dirt 5
Metro exodus

With full raytracing enabled on these titles they all crash within 10 minutes to an hour of playing.
It happens over and over unless i disable raytracing, then i can run them for hours. Enabled it again and they crash.
No other games ever crash that don't have raytracing in them.
I have tried using 100% fans incase it's overheating and also tried 20.1.1 20.2.1 and the latest 20.3.1 drivers to see if that was the issue, same problem with each of them.

Anyone else with 6700xt,6800/6900xt had this or willing to see if they can replicate this?
 
I occasionally run RT with the 6800 but never really experienced crashing - once in Metro Exodus on the launch drivers, never in Control, COD, Dirt or Watch Dogs.

Other than Dirt 5 though I generally have RT off on both the 3070 and the 6800 as it looks cack and DIRT 5 is only left on because the framerates are so high it doesn't really matter.

will give it a whirl on the 6700XT later this week to see if it can be repeated though.

For what it's worth, I never run my cards with "FAN STOP" enabled so everything is always pretty cool so don't know if a spike in temps would cause the issues your seeing.

Could always try the old knock off 100 MHz from target clock speed and see if that changes anything up
 
I occasionally run RT with the 6800 but never really experienced crashing - once in Metro Exodus on the launch drivers, never in Control, COD, Dirt or Watch Dogs.

Other than Dirt 5 though I generally have RT off on both the 3070 and the 6800 as it looks cack and DIRT 5 is only left on because the framerates are so high it doesn't really matter.

will give it a whirl on the 6700XT later this week to see if it can be repeated though.

For what it's worth, I never run my cards with "FAN STOP" enabled so everything is always pretty cool so don't know if a spike in temps would cause the issues your seeing.

Could always try the old knock off 100 MHz from target clock speed and see if that changes anything up
Appreciate it, i have tried using stock driver settings to eliminate that sort of problem, but i could try undrrclocking, but to what, as it's boosting itself..
Maybe others will have insight or similar issues
 
I played through the entire Metro Exodus game + 1 of the DLCs with ray tracing set to high for 90% of it (occasionally switched to 4K + no RT to see which looked better) and didn't experience any crashes at all. The only other game I have on your list is Control but I only tried it for around 15 minutes with RT on as I lost interest in the game, I didn't have any issues for that period of time.

Actually I did have 2 crashes in Metro Exodus when I was trying to tighten up my RAM timings, the timings passed everything until I played Metro Exodus however when I put them back to the recommended timings I had no further crashes. I don't suppose there would be a link to RAM timings and ray tracing would there? Unlikely, but might worth setting more conservative frequency and timings if you have yours tuned, just to see if it's still crashing...
 
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I played through the entire Metro Exodus game + 1 of the DLCs with ray tracing set to high for 90% of it (occasionally switched to 4K + no RT to see which looked better) and didn't experience any crashes at all. The only other game I have on your list is Control but I only tried it for around 15 minutes with RT on as I lost interest in the game, I didn't have any issues for that period of time.

Actually I did have 2 crashes in Metro Exodus when I was trying to tighten up my RAM timings, the timings passed everything until I played Metro Exodus however when I put them back to the recommended timings I had no further crashes. I don't suppose there would be a link to RAM timings and ray tracing would there? Unlikely, but might worth setting more conservative frequency and timings if you have yours tuned, just to see if it's still crashing...

The CPU has to work harder when Ray Tracing is enabled, as does GPU VRAM. As such issues with VRAM, CPU/RAM can cause instability that you don't see with Ray Tracing off. Not saying these are causing his crashes, just highlighting that Ray Tracing hits those components harder than rasterization.
 
I've only ever experienced crashes of the card with RT on if I overclock my 6800 too hard. It works fine without RT but RT crashes. If I then remove 20MHz then RT is fully stable. Of course this is just with oc, it works fine without any oc both with and without RT.
 
For a long period of time? Which games

Time - many hours at once. Games: World of Warcraft (RT shadows on); Dirt 5; 3DMark running in loop; BF V - it doesn't really matter which game. It just shows me that with too high clocks (or possibly any other kind of instability) RT cores in these cards lock up first before shaders. Hence if someone overclocks these cards I'd highly advise benchmarking them in RT enabled titles (even if 3DMark) to confirm stability.
 
Time - many hours at once. Games: World of Warcraft (RT shadows on); Dirt 5; 3DMark running in loop; BF V - it doesn't really matter which game. It just shows me that with too high clocks (or possibly any other kind of instability) RT cores in these cards lock up first before shaders. Hence if someone overclocks these cards I'd highly advise benchmarking them in RT enabled titles (even if 3DMark) to confirm stability.
Ive rolled back my ram timings to see if that helps at all, but after turning rt off on those games i could
play okay for hours no problem.
I hope it's unstable ram timings and not a problem with my cards rt
 
Ive rolled back my ram timings to see if that helps at all, but after turning rt off on those games i could
play okay for hours no problem.
I hope it's unstable ram timings and not a problem with my cards rt

In my case it was always a GPU clock. vRAM clocked too high (I slid it to the max) was working fine for hours but then randomly, even in IDLE (with my UW monitor RAM clocks never drop, even in IDLE), it would just cause black screen and PC froze. Only reset button would help. Moving vRAM clocks back by 1% solved that problem fully.

Anyway, in both cases it was just OC, stock is 100% stable (current OC as well). It's unlikely PC's RAM could cause just RT to cause issues, but we don't really know what exactly drivers and DX are doing with RT calls, hence CPU and RAM are surely involved in either case. PCs are a complex machine, with many points of failure and similar outcome, so might be hard to diagnose at times. Hopefully you'll manage with yours.
 
As said above RT puts more load and power usage on the GPU. This causes power spikes and some psu trip their protection
 
Try it with the entire system at stock settings inc gpu
In my case it was always a GPU clock. vRAM clocked too high (I slid it to the max) was working fine for hours but then randomly, even in IDLE (with my UW monitor RAM clocks never drop, even in IDLE), it would just cause black screen and PC froze. Only reset button would help. Moving vRAM clocks back by 1% solved that problem fully.

Anyway, in both cases it was just OC, stock is 100% stable (current OC as well). It's unlikely PC's RAM could cause just RT to cause issues, but we don't really know what exactly drivers and DX are doing with RT calls, hence CPU and RAM are surely involved in either case. PCs are a complex machine, with many points of failure and similar outcome, so might be hard to diagnose at times. Hopefully you'll manage with yours.
Time - many hours at once. Games: World of Warcraft (RT shadows on); Dirt 5; 3DMark running in loop; BF V - it doesn't really matter which game. It just shows me that with too high clocks (or possibly any other kind of instability) RT cores in these cards lock up first before shaders. Hence if someone overclocks these cards I'd highly advise benchmarking them in RT enabled titles (even if 3DMark) to confirm stability.
So as i said earlier i rolled back my ram timings just a tiny bit and happy to say that it's solved the problem.
The system was stable as a rock until i played rt titles, but now all is good. Just played modern warfare single played maxed out at 4k RT for about 3 hours not a single crash (120+fps in case you're interested)

Thank you very much, for all that helped.
 
So as i said earlier i rolled back my ram timings just a tiny bit and happy to say that it's solved the problem.
The system was stable as a rock until i played rt titles, but now all is good. Just played modern warfare single played maxed out at 4k RT for about 3 hours not a single crash (120+fps in case you're interested)

Thank you very much, for all that helped.
Awesome news! Chuffed for you. :)
 
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