Short preface: not long ago, my video card has suddenly stopped outputting through Displayport cable. During my attempts to diagnose and remedy this, I had my CPU and GPU cleaned with thermal paste changed and Windows reinstalled. Eventually, I just bought an HDMI cable, and it all works fine, or so it seems.

However, now I have unfortunate crashes while trying to play the newest Hitman. The reason I specify Hitman is because I don't encounter any issues with other tasks. SVP can be intensive on both CPU and GPU, and yet works stable. I ran Furmark test for half an hour and had no issues at around 70 degrees. And other intensive games, such as Subnautica, also work fine. HITMAN, however, freezes in about 10 minutes of gameplay (milage can vary, but I didn't manage more than 20 minutes of continuous play). I monitored the temperatures with Speccy and witnessed no overheating during the gameplay.

I have tried:

  • lowering resolution
  • lowering graphics settings
  • switching from DX12 to DX11
  • turning off VSync
  • raising power limit through MSI Afterburner (actually led to faster crashes)
  • reinstalling drivers and updating Windows

Nothing seemed to help. Particularly grating is the fact that i haven't finished current Elusive Target (separate thank you to IO for keeping this ridiculous MMO-like time-limited crap even after going independent). So, I was wondering whether anyone has encountered similar issues, or can just tell why this happens.
My GPU is 3 years old, so it wouldn't be a surprise if it's some hardware failure. But I wonder why does it only appear to occur in this one game.

tl;dr After some troubles with GPU Hitman started to crash. But only Hitman for some reason.

6 years ago*

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Instead of letting the card automatically adjust, I would try setting manual voltage and clock speeds. Set the voltage to whatever is stock or close to it and set the clock speed to stock or something reasonable. Every time the game crashes, reduce the clock speed and try again. Once you no longer have any crashing, I would drop the clock speed a tiny bit more just to be sure it will always be stable.

Some games are just really demanding in a certain way and can make the GPU unstable even if it was stable in stress tests. I have had this happen with certain games.

Edit: It seems like a lot of people have problems with this game crashing.

6 years ago*
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Well, I had to lower the core clock by whopping 75 MHz, but it seems more stable now. I guess I will have to start saving up money in case GPU dies on me completely. But the fact that everything else worked fooled me.

Thank you very much for the help!

6 years ago
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Actually, it's not all that bright. The initial stable play may have been just a fluke, and I still get crashes even when underclocking to 800 MHz (from 945 MHz). I mean, there has gotta be a reasonable limit before underclocking can still help, right? Especially without any problems in other programs.

(Also, most posts on crashes in HITMAN I found were related to DirectX 12. I had no crashes at both DirectX 11 and 12 before, but now crash on both.)

6 years ago
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If you underclock by 10% and it still crashes, but only in that game, then it is that game at fault, simple as that. Heck, usually 5% underclock ensures that the card has almost zero chance of overheating or getting any physical limitation, unless it is almost literally choking in dust bunnies.

6 years ago
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That's fair. What bothered me is that I went from "no crashes at all" to "crash all the time", so I couldn't say for certain who's more at fault here - my hardware or the game.
Besides, no one else seems to have that issue on official or Steam forums, so it doesn't seem to be some faulty update I missed during my problem.

6 years ago
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That is a big frequency drop. That should be more than enough to fix any stability issue. When my GTX 580 started to crash in certain games as it got old, I only had to drop it from 830Mhz to 800. The GPU is probably not the problem if you can still play other games or run stress tests.

If you are running an overclocked CPU, you may want to try dropping those clocks a little just to make sure it's not the CPU. If that isn't the problem, it is probably just something wrong with the game.

6 years ago
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I haven't considered a CPU problem, although I never overclocked it and ran prime95 tests fine (or at the very least, the tests remained stable for longer than the game managed to). I'll try that later, thanks.

6 years ago
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If it's not overclocked and you don't have any problems in other games or anywhere else, it's probably not the CPU either. It really just sounds like a problem with the game. Especially since it is only happening in Hitman and it looks like Hitman has major problems with crashing for a lot of people.

6 years ago
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Well, damn. I guess I will just have to give up on it, since I'm sure the game forums will just blame the hardware as the cause of crashes starting. Shame, I liked the game a lot until this problem.

6 years ago
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Try lowering the memory clock speed as well.

6 years ago
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Thanks for suggestion, but changes to memory clock seem to make the game even more unstable.

6 years ago
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you have a cooler issue, either CPU or GPU. I had the same a while back before i did an upgrade...so consider that you might need to put osme money soon when it will die completely

6 years ago
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Even if I have no overheat on both CPU and GPU?

6 years ago
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Well, after much despair and tweaking of various values, I managed to set a record of continuous 30 minutes play by... cleaning the registry. Yikes, out of all possible things it was a bunch of links to missing DLLs from who-knows-where that caused the problems. Probably, that is, maybe it was just another fluke.
Thanks to everyone who provided suggestions. I will keep the thread for posterity's sake (and for travelers from the future who may stumble upon a similar issue).

6 years ago
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