DCS Randomly Freezes PC

[Shimakaze514]

After reading everyone's comments, I think some details about the game freezing need to be re-clarified:
1. The freezing occurs anywhere the DCS menu is open, which can be the main screen, the online menu, or the settings page.
2. When you cut out the DCS window, for example, hang DCS in the background and start browsing Chrome, or even browsing your own desktop, the PC freezing caused by DCS will still make your entire computer unresponsive, and the mouse and keyboard are unavailable.

If you are willing to look at the windows minidump after the crash, you will find that this is caused by DCS's very poor USB driver handling. The PC freezing is neither due to the RAM size and pagefile size mentioned by @sleighzy, nor the tacview plug-in mentioned by @MAXsenna, but the DCS code that reads the USB driver has a serious problem, causing the polling to enter an infinite loop. After freezing for dozens of minutes, Windows detected that the IRP response timed out and decided to restart automatically.

DCS's scheduling problem with USB drivers seems to have become serious after the April version update. Although there were some suggestions like "lowering your G502 mouse polling rate can increase the DCS frame rate" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrqZnFzPMps), I didn't take it seriously for a long time. Until the April version update, both of my computers (Windows 10 and 11) had device-related problems. On the Windows 10 computer, when entering the cockpit to play, a track IR device plugged prompt will pop up every two or three seconds (I don't have any track IR), and then the game screen will freeze for half a second, then the device will unplugged, and freeze for another half a second. I temporarily solved this problem by disabling hot plugging. However, the problem on the Windows 11 computer is more serious and cannot be solved by disabling hot plugging.

At first I didn't think the DCS issues on these two computers had anything to do with the youtube video, until a few days ago when the computer automatically restarted due to DCS freezing (I found that if you leave DCS alone after freezing, it will always restart automatically) and caused Windows to create the minidump file, I realized that this might be a serious, long-standing DCS code problem with the USB driver. It's funny that the mouse polling rate affects the game frame rate, but now there are problems with trackir spawning from the void, or directly locking the USB driver to cause the PC to freeze. Considering the situation of this post, it is obvious that I am not the only one who has encountered this problem.

What can we do? At present, it seems that we can only wait for Eagle Dynamics @BIGNEWY to notice this problem and pay enough attention to it, or wait for the subsequent DCS updates to make this problem worse. I am not completely ignorant of computers. On the contrary, I have spent a lot of time and energy using various tools to find the cause of this freezing problem, eliminate various interferences, and finally have a considerable degree of confidence that the problem is indeed caused by DCS's improper scheduling of USB drivers.

Please do not post messages like "You don't have enough RAM", "Your PC is a low-end device", "You have too many plugins installed", "DCS log files can reveal problems" in this thread, unless you have also done relevant research and can use a unified theory to explain the three situations I mentioned above (mouse polling rate, spawn track ir and main menu freeze). RAM size has nothing to do with USB drives. No matter how good a PC is, it cannot jump out of the infinite loop code. DCS log does not produce any useful information as far as I can see. Those who clamored to see the DCS log did not propose any effective solutions for these logs after we posted them. We will give those suggestions that are easy to say but costly to do, such as "reinstall your DCS", "reinstall your system", "change a computer", "upgrade your RAM", "reinstall the chipset driver", "reinstall the graphics card driver". It's easy to say, but for everyone who encounters the DCS freeze problem and is at a loss, these solutions have no clear direction, do not reveal the cause of the freeze, and are costly. I hope everyone can scientifically and rigorously explore the cause instead of making such "suggestions" irresponsibly.

Edited April 23 by Shimakaze514

[Gr_Chris]

I temporarily solved the problem with menu freeze and in game freeze by setting fps limit from dcs settings to max(300). I had it locked  at 70fps before. Hopefully this can help.

Also during freeze try clicking the mouse and tell me if there is any difference.

 

 

Edited April 23 by Gr_Chris

[sleighzy]

@Shimakaze514 Thanks for the feedback, very informative re: the TrackIR stuff in your last comment.

Quote

On the Windows 10 computer, when entering the cockpit to play, a track IR device plugged prompt will pop up every two or three seconds (I don't have any track IR), and then the game screen will freeze for half a second, then the device will unplugged, and freeze for another half a second. I temporarily solved this problem by disabling hot plugging. However, the problem on the Windows 11 computer is more serious and cannot be solved by disabling hot plugging.

In this comment you state that you don't have TrackIR, yet on Windows 10 you were getting device plugged/unplugged events for this. You haven't posted a log from that, so I can't confirm if those particular ones showed up in the log. These events do not show up in the log you posted. DCS will log these events, which can be related to either hotplugging (which you said you'd disabled), or other factors such as not using a powered usb hub, or usb power management. Or additional issues with too many devices on a hub causing saturation of the usb controller with bandwidth and interrupts etc. Based on your logs you have no additional peripherals such as MFDs etc. so I assuming not an issue around that. You said however you have no TrackIR device, but still get these issues. From the Windows 11 log you attached a few days ago it is definitely registering that a TrackIR device, or something reporting itself as being one by Windows, is connected.

2025-04-18 03:23:16.770 INFO    INPUT (Main): created [Keyboard]
2025-04-18 03:23:16.825 INFO    INPUT (Main): created [TrackIR]

Are you able to determine further why a TrackIR device is being reported? Not sure if a tool like https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html or https://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtreeview_e.html would help with this.

Edited April 23 by sleighzy

[Japo32]

Thanks it is not me. Never had these freeze before. In vr all ok. It is in flat screens and in menus only. Freeze all the computer. It has to be with something of latest updates. No more than 2 months. didn't  update drivers as there were all ok.

Edited April 25 by Japo32

[Japo32]

One thing I noticed is that if I remove the affinity of latest two cpu cores (the virtual and the real one) I don't have any more freezes. If I activate it, I do.

[felipesm]

Unplayable here, freezing my pc all time, on main menu, in f10 map , in alt+tab to chrome and in flight too.

My pc specs:

i7 9700KF

RX 6700XT

32gb RAM

ssd nvme

dcs.log

Edited May 6 by felipesm
update pc specs

[...Miller...]

Did anyone find a fix for this?

[Goetsch]

Ultra 285K / 256G RAM / RTX 5090 / PCIe 5.0 SSD / Win11
I had been experiencing exactly the same problem as you.

You can try, after launching DCS, going into Task Manager and disabling CPU-8 for DCS.exe
(If there’s no CPU-8, try disabling the foremost E-core that has the highest resource usage)

This should work well to resolve the issue. At least in my case, doing so effectively solved those strange “Not Responding” problems.

Edited August 11 by Goetsch

[Japo32]

I hope @BIGNEWY tells someone in ED to fix this one, becuase it has been a while with this issue. If you have hyperthreading, I have to deactivate the latest 4 ones (CPU 15, 14, 13 and 12). And this only happens in 2D. In vR no problem.
And this happens in menus specially. No way to save any replay.

Edited August 11 by Japo32

[Goetsch]

Just now, Japo32 said:

I hope @BIGNEWY tells someone in ED to fix this one, becuase it has been a while with this issue. If you have hyperthreading, I have to deactivate the latest 4 ones (CPU 15, 14, 13 and 12). And this only happens in 2D. In vR no problem

I once suspected that my CPU was faulty...LoL

[BIGNEWY]

@Japo32 Hi, 

can you confirm if you are still setting an affinity? and do you have hyperthreading / smt enabled?

If you are using core parking try without and let me know the results. 

thank you 

[Japo32]

I have hyperthreading in the bios. Don't know what is smt, and core parking. If you mean that the cores stops after time iddle, no.. they are always at full capacity

[BIGNEWY]

6 hours ago, Japo32 said:

I have hyperthreading in the bios. Don't know what is smt, and core parking. If you mean that the cores stops after time iddle, no.. they are always at full capacity

can you try without the core parking or any editing of the affinity, then attach your dcs log and dxdiag again. 

 

dont worry about smt, its AMD's version of hyperthreading ( I wasnt sure what cpu you had ) 

[Japo32]

On 8/11/2025 at 10:35 PM, BIGNEWY said:

can you try without the core parking or any editing of the affinity, then attach your dcs log and dxdiag again. 

 

dont worry about smt, its AMD's version of hyperthreading ( I wasnt sure what cpu you had ) 

deactivated core parking with regedit and still the same issue. Maybe less time to reactivate from block computer, but still the issue. Here the log and dxdiag

DxDiag.txt dcs.log DSMC.log

[BIGNEWY]

6 hours ago, Japo32 said:

deactivated core parking with regedit and still the same issue. Maybe less time to reactivate from block computer, but still the issue. Here the log and dxdiag

DxDiag.txt 110.71 kB · 0 downloads dcs.log 64.69 kB · 0 downloads DSMC.log 2.09 kB · 0 downloads

Thanks, are you using a xmp profile for your RAM? Your dxdiag shows some memory timing issues, it maybe be worth trying default values and see if you notice a difference. 

Also with windows 10 EOL consider upgrading to windows 11, you may find better performance with it as it handles cores much better then windows 10. 

Also are you using VR? Just noticed your desktop resolution does not match your dcs resolution. 

[Japo32]

I have 3 screens and that configuration is the same as the 2 screens connected to use Varjo. In any case I tested also 1920x1080 and still is the same issue.. About Win11 I will try in future. For now not, because I have lot of working programs and I may have issue with it, but as said, in VR there is not this issue, and mostly I fly on VR so it was never a rush for me this one, but maybe for others yes. About the RAM I will checkout. 
Thanks!

[...Miller...]

I've also been having issues with the game freezing and even totally locking my computer so that I have to do a hard reset but I think I've found the cause of the problem.

For me it seems to be Beam Eye Tracker, after shutting it down the game runs fine.

 

UPDATE

I am now using Process Lasso to change the CPU affinity of Beam Eye Tracker, setting it to use all CPUs instead of just one.  This was the reason for the freezing, CPU#15 was hitting 130% usage and locking up my system.

I'd suggest others take a look at their CPU usage to see if something running in the background is hogging a single CPU.

Edited 15 hours ago by ...Miller...

[Prusik]

I have the same issue over here. I've tried everything. The thing is, i had this problem before, and i managed to fix it about a year ago by completely formatting all my drives and reinstalling windows and everything. It seems logical that this worked. The issue started happening a couple of days ago, i have managed to make the freezes appear less often by cleaning up my fxo and metashaders2 folders every time before i boot into the game. The best I've had was today, a total of 2 hours of no freezes. After that, back to "normal", a freeze every 10 minutes or so. Most of the time they appear when i input something, like changing view with the F keys, like moving the camera, like moving the throttles, almost every time it freezes up it freezes when i input a command. As of writing this, i am currently trying to reinstall windows without deleting my other files, to see of any corruption was only in the windows folders, not in the dcs ones. Thing is, this only happens in dcs, not in any other games or stress tests, or anything. Happens even in menus aswell, when the system isn't under load. Will keep you guys updated 

[Prusik]

It fixed it. Since i did so many full repairs of DCS, i figure that the problem was within Windows itself. Just moved everything else except windows and DCS to another drive, and in a couple of hours i set up my pc once again. It's not a long lasting solution tho, since i had the same issue before, and fixed it in the same way. I know I'm not that helpful, but that practically means that the issue is not hardware related, since no components have been changed and it works perfectly now. Tell me if it works for you guys aswell, and, if you manage to find a better solution.