Question games (and only games) freezing after flashing to black screen

Aug 18, 2023
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Here's my system, which I bought 4 years ago from CyberPowerPC:

ASUS TUF X570-Plus mobo (had an old BIOS version up until yesterday when I updated to latest, and that didn't fix it)
Ryzen 5 3600
MasterLiquid Lite liquid cooler (seems to be doing its job nicely, I don't get high temps)
16GB DDR4-3200 (Corsair Vengeance, just replaced the DDR4-2600 chips they shipped with it even though I had ordered 3200, this didn't fix the crashing)
AMD Radeon RX 6600XT (this recently replaced a GeForce GTX 1650, but the crash looks exactly the same with either card)
600W 80+ Gold PSU

The GPU isn't even getting hot enough to turn on the fan -- I have "Radeon Chill" set with a max of 60FPS. I doubt it's a power issue either given the relatively low power consumption there.

I'm using two ultrawide 2560x1080 monitors. All of this *may* have started when I got the second monitor but I'm not certain of that. Definitely the two monitors are a great help when working from home and in music production, and going back to just one isn't an option.

It only crashes on games, not any other heavy CPU load stuff. And it's just some games, not all -- lately it's mostly been Art of Rally and New Star GP, as well as a few demos I tried on Steam. With Dirt Rally 2.0, it would sometimes hang, flash the screen to black and then recover and I'd just keep playing. It never has any problems with Soulstone Survivors, Vampire Survivors, Guild Wars 2, Noita, or several others.

Event Viewer only has Windows Error Reporting and Application Hang entries.

After trying several driver versions and a completely different graphics card, replacing the RAM, updating my BIOS etc. I'm at a loss here.
 
Aug 18, 2023
4
1
15
It just occurred to me, the games where it has this issue are the ones where I'm using an XBox controller. No wonder it was happening more with racing games than others, ha!

So that's definitely an avenue I should be checking into...