Discord video call prevents TDR crashes

[Raven (Elysian Angel)]

Rik closed the TDR thread while I was typing this, so I made a new post:

 

Guys, finally I found the cause of problem, that's overheating. DCS would crash anytime the GPU temperature over 72* Celcius. So I tried to cool down the Case, it works and I got no more crash.

Overheating is one of the things that's reported to prevent TDR errors when you search the Internet, indeed, but generally speaking it is definitely a software problem.

I am happy you got your crashes fixed Anlq, but on my system the crashes happen at very predictable moments under very specific circumstances:

 

- When starting the F/A-18C quickstart Caucasus take-off mission, I fly north towards the mountains, the screen starts flashing and DCS crashes about 1-2 minutes after I reach them (at low altitudes);

- When starting the F-14B quickstart Caucasus take-off mission, I fly south towards the mountains, the screen starts flashing and DCS crashes about 1-2 minutes after I reach them (at low altitudes);

- When starting the Ka-50 quickstart Caucasus free flight mission, the helo spawns near a city, the screen starts flashing and DCS crashes within 10 seconds of pressing "Fly";

- When starting the Mi-8MTV2 quickstart Caucasus cold start mission, I start the helo, take off and the screen starts flashing and DCS crashes within a few seconds of me reaching a few dozen ft;

- While landing at ANY airport that has a city around/near it (e.g. Khasab in Oman, Lavan Airport in Iran), DCS crashes at low speed / low altitude (which tends to happen during landings ).

 

 

These crashes are 100% reproducable and have nothing to do with overheating, since they are related to those circumstances and are independent of the time spent in the air or how long my PC has been running:

- I can fly around in NTTR for hours without problems if I avoid Las Vegas;

- I can fly around on the SoH map for hours if I avoid Dubai, Abu Dhabi and airports next to cities;

- I can fly around on the Caucasus map for hours if I avoid the mountain ranges and the hills around Batumi.

 

That being said, I did find out something very interesting by accident:

Since the black flashes / screen flickering that's been reported here and here is very much related to TDR crashes, I may have found something that completely prevents both issues (that is, on a PC that doesn't have any other issues such as overheating - see post above).

 

I was on a Discord video call with a friend while flying around in the Caucasus map doing reproducability crash testing, when I noticed that while that call was going on, I could fly around undisturbed by black screen flickering or the infamous "Application has been blocked from accessing graphics hardware."

 

As reported earlier, on my system both DCS.exe and OVRServer_x64.exe (a service by Oculus) crash, forcing me to either reboot or log out and back in if I want to restart DCS:

 

 

Now, if I go to the Discord settings -> Voice and Video -> "Test Video" and leave that running while starting DCS, I can fly around in above mentioned situations while DCS.exe keeps running but OVRServer_x64.exe crashes: the image in my Rift headset freezes but if I lift up the headset slightly so I can look underneath, the left-eye mirror image on my monitor keeps running, which gives me ample opportunity to fly to the nearest air base and land safely.

 

So I made a 2nd Discord account and logged in there on my laptop, and called that 2nd account from my PC with video enabled on both.

Lo and behold, I can fly around above cities, in mountains, etc for as long as I want without any issues!

 

I did several tests of this, on different days and after rebooting my PC in-between tests, and this is 100% reproducable on my PC: as long as there is a Discord video call running, with both sides' webcams enabled, DCS.exe and OVRServer_x64.exe are unaffected by TDR problems!

 

Since Rik mentioned nor the ED team nor the testers experience this issue, hopefully the tech/IT wizards within ED can do something with this and conjure up a permanent fix for this problem that has been plaguing so many people since DCS 2.5.4 went Live last December...

 

I'll notify Rik and NineLine of this accidental discovery, so hopefully this leads to something good.

 

Thanks!

Edited May 17, 2019 by Elysian Angel