DCS 2.9 Hardlocked Crash

[cailean_556]

Good evening ED team,

I've had a significant crash occur 4 times now over the last few months and I'm unable to replicate the conditions or even figure out what has happened as the logs don't save, or show, an event. Or at least anywhere I know to look doesn't seem to show or indicate a crash or even the events leading up to it.

=ISSUE=

DCS freezes/locks, the computer emits an extremely irritating tone through the speakers, I am unable to further interact with the computer (computer does not recognise mouse or keyboard input). If I leave it long enough, the computer restarts of its own accord however the noise is extremely annoying so the PC requires a hard restart.

This occurrence does not seem to be driven by how long DCS has been running, as it has occurred once a few minutes after mission start while today, it has occurred ~50 minutes in (there were instances of compressing time to speed up the mission's progress). 

My PC drivers are up-to-date, including most recently the GPU (nVidia RTX-3080, updated yesterday). The computer doesn't seem to be running hot nor does there appear to be any hardware reason the crash occurs - that I am able to discern. These crashes seem to occur mostly when I am using the F2 menu to watch other aircraft in the mission (3 of the 4 occurrences have been in the F2 external view, once while in the cockpit), which suggests it could potentially be graphics-related however it could just be coincidence as there are a number of other things occurring at the same time (ordnance is being fired, AAA is firing, there is smoke, ground units are moving) so I cannot discount that something else is causing some kind of issue.

The crash is impossible for me to replicate as I have gone days or weeks without coming across this crash (creating a campaign, I have been working on this particular mission since late September in sporadic sessions) however these crashes have, in recent memory, all occurred while working on this particular mission - however I have also had multiple, longer sessions where I have not encountered this crash at all in this same mission.

I have refrained from reporting it earlier thinking it an isolated case however today has been my first dedicated DCS session since late October and I encountered this issue while watching the AI undertake their assigned tasks ~50 minutes into the mission - this time is the 'straw that broke the camel's back' so-to-speak.

Are you able to provide guidance on what steps I can take to provide usable data for you to review - should I encounter this again?

[cailean_556]

I should add that describing the crash in a Google search

provides advice that also suggests issues with hard drive/file corruption - following the steps to diagnose those faults yields no obvious issues.

[sleighzy]

1. Provide your DCS log file regardless, prior to restarting the game.
2. Run the Windows dxdiag tool, save the report and attach it here. This will show the last 10 crashes in your system and the associated processes, codes, etc. You can provide this now.

You can also run the following commands to check for, and repair, possible system issues. Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) as Administrator and run each command individually and then restart your PC.

dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth

sfc /scannow

 

[cailean_556]

Apologies for taking so long, had dinner and then went down the fault diagnosis rabbit hole as some tech support pages also suggested the PSU could be an issue - or my GPU, or BIOS (which I'm fairly certain is okay)...

Files requested provided below.

I was looking at the wrong log file before (cef_log) however, while I can see a number of errors listed in the dcs.log file, none seem to apply to what was going on on-screen at the time of the crash (not that that means much in terms of cause).

Unsure how the Dxdiag numbers the crashes (is 0 the latest, or is 9 the latest?) but crash 0 seems to show something to do with the GPU's processes. This caused me to open the newly-installed nVidia app (installed yesterday while updating drivers) and double-check my nVidia drivers.

It seems that despite updating my nVidia drivers *literally yesterday* there was a driver update dated 6 days ago ready to download. Unsure what's going on there, but I've done the CMD.exe prompts - and now re-updated what I was under the impression was already updated - and I'm about to restart.

I won't have time to test DCS again tonight, so I'll try again tomorrow and report back here if a crash happens again. 

Thanks.

dcs.log DxDiag.txt

[sleighzy]

Looking at your DxDiag.txt file I see the following:

• 4 occurrences of LiveKernelEvent with code 141. This is a hardware failure, generally the video card or power. Good article here with further explanation and areas of investigation: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/livekernelevent-141-when-playing-games/4485bdee-bb9f-4ef9-97a4-6c1fe5a14ce4#:~:text=The LiveKernelEvent 141 error is,the graphics card or power.
• 2 occurrences of BlueScreen with code 161. Also indicative of video card issue: Further article here on both error code and the one above in combo: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/windows-shutting-down-unexpectedly-with-bluescreen/e0bbc619-8689-4f0b-9a01-a3dab29ed01d
• 3 occurrences of StoreAgentDownloadFailure1. I haven't looked into this one.

Let's see whether or not you get further crashes after updating that graphics driver if that is the cause.

I also dropped your log file into the DCS log analyser which had further performance tuning advice:

• Enable Full Screen mode.
• Turn off SSAO.
• Turn off SSLR.
• Set Water to Medium or Low.
• Set Shadows to Medium.
• Turn down Anisotropic Filtering.
• Disable civil traffic.

SSAO and SSLR can be performance hits with next to no benefit so advise to just turn off.

Just a heads up, I'm not part of the ED team, I'm just another community user who enjoys the game and helps folk troubleshoot problems that crop up (a lot of them are common issues).

[rob10]

Sounds like the logs are pointing that way too, but usually if it's a hard crash with the loud squeal that's a hardware issue rather than a Windows or DCS issue.

[jmarso]

When I had this happen I had an overheat issue in my computer. My recommendation would be to check your heat sink (or have it checked at a repair shop.) There's an app  called Speccy which you can download that will show you your component temps.