UE4 Games hard crash the PC

Soldato
Joined
8 Jan 2009
Posts
4,589
So strange problem.

Most UE4 games hard crash my PC, where am forced to hold down the power switch to restart the computer while the fans scream like crazy, the major games are in this order, Back 4 Blood, Project Wingman, Aliens Fireteam and Space Hulk - Deathwing

Other UE4 games like Foxhole (engine is hacked to bits by the devs), Squad and Life is Strange won't crash my PC.

All other none UE4 games won't crash, they run fine.

I found a work-around to get them working. This is how I do it, I start Foxhole, play for a bit of time and than start above games and than close Foxhole. I also had Epic Games Launcher installed at one point where I would run too to help fix the issue as I read others have the same problem. This doesn't always work, but it's the only way I found out, recently, I learned that this works much better as long as I start one of the above games while one of the others is running.

It wasn't always like this, the issue first started with Back 4 Blood than Project Wingman and Aliens Fireteam started to get the same problem.

  • AMD Ryzen 5 3600
  • ASUS ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING II
  • 32 GB RAM (4x8GB) Corsair Vengeance RGB RT 3600MHz
  • XRX RX 480 GPU (latest drivers)
  • Seasonic Core Gold GC 650 650W 80+ Gold PSU
  • Windows 11 (Fresh installation, few days old, had this issue on Win100 too)
Nothing is overclocked.

I'm pretty much left with two options now, return my motherboard bundle and PSU back to the retailer for them to test it as it's still under warranty or buy a new expensive GPU with no guarantee that it fix my issue.

I don't see how it's a hardware issue thu, since once these games are running, I can play them fine, it seems more like some sort of problem with UE4 and a game like Foxhole which runs the same engine while heavy edited, must have a file or something that the other games need to start.
 
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I'm pretty much left with two options now, return my motherboard bundle and PSU back to the retailer for them to test it as it's still under warranty or buy a new expensive GPU with no guarantee that it fix my issue.

not really an option as you have said the system works with other games and the retailer gives zero poos about a game if you hardware works it works.
 
How long dose it hang for before blue screen or is it just a full system lock and no blue screen.

Open a game you know will crash then look in error logs

Generally two things, PC just instantly turns off, no blue screen, no error messages, just turns off, but mostly, it just crashes without any blue screen, no error messages, screens go black with the GPU or CPU fans going crazy.

Both require me to hold down the power button to restart the computer and boots up like nothing ever happened.

not really an option as you have said the system works with other games and the retailer gives zero poos about a game if you hardware works it works.

Retailer doesn't have a problem with me returning the system for them to look at it, I have two years of system support and they already accepted the return, but am going to pass on it for now.

So again today. I managed to play the above broken games by playing Foxhole for a few hours and starting them with this running. I feel that Foxhole (UE4) game is starting some .dll, some directx whatever file that the other games need but the other games don't run upon the starting process.

Try with just 2x8GB RAM and/or memtest the RAM.

You might be on something here, a while ago, I had some faulty ram that got replaced and I think while I only had 16GB installed, I didn't have this problem I think, until I booted up to 32GB.

I will these options as soon as possible.

I'd also try putting it at 2666 @ 1.2v.

I'd suggest trying one of the pre 20 drivers, I use 19.11.3 for polaris because the newer drivers cause black screens for me.

Memory was running at 1.2v already, but with advice from OC discord, I tired 1.4v and that didn't work. I did try a older GPU driver once, didn't fix it, but it might be worth revisiting a older driver again.
 
I would always say a full on hard crash is ram. The fans kicking is just for safety.

Remove all overclocks, XMP on your ram is an overclock.
Reset bios, remover all overclocking and or monitoring software like afterburner, HWINFO and all that crap
Run updates on everything including things that don’t needed it, reinstall gpu drivers will a full DDU uninstall
Pull all but one stick of ram and test..
 
Memory was running at 1.2v already, but with advice from OC discord, I tired 1.4v and that didn't work. I did try a older GPU driver once, didn't fix it, but it might be worth revisiting a older driver again.

If it was running 1.2v at 3600 it would not have been anywhere near stable.
 
So I finally got around to doing the tests, started with dropping down to 16GB, still crashed, dropped to 8GB, still crashed.

Swapped out the RX480 and installed my old 7870 that I was saving as a backup and all the games started up no problem, no crash issues. So, am going to order a new GPU.
 
that an odd one that the GPU only crashed with a few games


It is not odd at all. Some games will stress the gpu memory more than others and I suspect that is what is happening with the RX480 and causing the crashes. Other games will not be as heavy on memory and the bottleneck will be the pixel shading performance of texture fill rate.

Edit - If the OP still wants the RX480 to be useable you could turn down the memory speed with Afterburner and see if it makes the card stable again.
 
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