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.