DCS Crashes Hard - Video Driver Flicker

[GeoS72]

While in the Mission Editor, I experienced 3 hard crashes to desktop. One crash completely locked up my PC. I had to force power off because of the lack of response. I suspect there is a corelation to the latest update, DCS 2.9.22.17790 after downloading the C-130J Module.

I was creating Dynamic Templates in the South Atlantic Map when these crashes occurred. While dragging a unit, I would hear my fans kick into higher gear and see a tremendous amount of hard drive activity. There was lag while moving assets around. Just moving the mouse without dragging an asset would cause lag and massive stuttering. My monitor and RGB keyboard would flash and I would see a black screen. I couldn't Alt-Tab. DCS just locked the eff up!

This also happened while editing my Syria map. I thought it was a fluke then, but after experienced the same failure on 4 occasions, then THAT'S a PROBLEM!

See attached DCS logs.

dcs.log-20251128-031049.zip dcs.log-20251128-032203.zip dcs.20251128-041543.crash dcs.20251128-041543.dmp dcs.log dcs.log.old

[sleighzy]

Turn off Ray Tracing in the special options for the C130. Start with that first. Number of folk experiencing various issues with this. (although I would have expected just when actually using it)

Moving the mouse causing lag has been a cause in the past for some others due to mouse polling issues. You can drop the polling rate in your mouse software to 125 and see what happens.

Numerous issues in one of these logs, I'm still going through others.

• Out of memory errors. You have 96Gb of RAM though, but this may be video card related. Delete your Saved Games\DCS\fxo and metashaders2 folders to clean out the shader caches. This has been encountered in the past causing OOM errors even with large VRAM and RAM. Ideally these folders should be deleted (or use the clean shaders option in the launcher) after every upgrade if you haven't done so already.
• You have a dxgi.dll file in your installation. Perhaps for Optiscaler as you're on an AMD card, or ReShade? There are d3d11 crashes which can be caused by this, remove it for troubleshooting purposes. One is noted in your log below.
• You're run DCS from the bin-mt directory, run from the bin folder (or not the MT shortcut). They're both multithreaded and bin-mt will be removed in the future.
• There's also another error prior to the crash with what appears to be a video card issue "DX11BACKEND (27908): DX device removed. Reason: 0x887A0005" and "DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED". Remove any overclocking from your GPU. Reinstall your video card drivers.

2025-11-28 03:22:01.877 INFO    APP (Main): Device unplugged: [DISPLAY] Generic Monitor (VGA)
2025-11-28 03:22:01.952 WARNING LOG (6172): 2 duplicate message(s) skipped.
2025-11-28 03:22:01.952 INFO    APP (Main): Device unplugged: [USB] USB-VGA-17
2025-11-28 03:22:02.072 WARNING LOG (6172): 5 duplicate message(s) skipped.
2025-11-28 03:22:02.072 INFO    APP (Main): Device unplugged: [DISPLAY] Generic Monitor (VGA)
2025-11-28 03:22:02.132 WARNING LOG (6172): 2 duplicate message(s) skipped.
2025-11-28 03:22:02.132 INFO    APP (Main): Device unplugged: [USB] USB-VGA-17
2025-11-28 03:22:02.252 WARNING LOG (6172): 5 duplicate message(s) skipped.
2025-11-28 03:22:02.252 INFO    APP (Main): Device unplugged: [DISPLAY] Generic Monitor (VGA)
2025-11-28 03:22:02.313 WARNING LOG (6172): 2 duplicate message(s) skipped.
2025-11-28 03:22:02.313 INFO    APP (Main): Device unplugged: [USB] USB-VGA-17
2025-11-28 03:22:02.328 ERROR   DX11BACKEND (27908): failed to create vertex buffer. Reason: DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED
2025-11-28 03:22:02.328 ERROR   DX11BACKEND (27908): Failed assert `false && "failed to create vertex buffer"`
2025-11-28 03:22:02.330 INFO    EDCORE (27908): try to write dump information
2025-11-28 03:22:02.332 INFO    EDCORE (27908): # -------------- 20251128-032203 --------------
2025-11-28 03:22:02.332 INFO    APP (Main): Device unplugged: [USB] USB-VGA-17
2025-11-28 03:22:02.333 INFO    EDCORE (27908): DCS/2.9.22.17790 (x86_64; MT; Windows NT 10.0.26200)
2025-11-28 03:22:02.333 INFO    EDCORE (27908): C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\d3d11.dll
2025-11-28 03:22:02.334 INFO    EDCORE (27908): # C0000005 ACCESS_VIOLATION at 00007ffbe2054a5a 00:00000000
2025-11-28 03:22:02.335 INFO    EDCORE (27908): SymInit: Symbol-SearchPath: 'D:\Games\DCS World\bin-mt;', symOptions: 532, UserName: 'GeoS'
2025-11-28 03:22:02.335 INFO    EDCORE (27908): OS-Version: 10.0.26200 () 0x100-0x1
2025-11-28 03:22:02.336 INFO    EDCORE (27908): 0x0000000000154a5a (d3d11): D3DKMTOpenResource + 0xA475A
2025-11-28 03:22:02.337 INFO    EDCORE (27908): 0x000000000004434c (dx11backend): createRenderer + 0x28DAC

More info in the video card DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED error here.

https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/support/faq/startup/#3312253

Can't tell if the USB unplug events are just a side-effect of this, I'm only seeing ones related to video/monitor stuff vs. all (subset) of other devices.

Edited 11 hours ago by sleighzy

[sleighzy]

One of these zip log files is also corrupted which can also be an indication of running out of memory when trying to this information during a crash.

[sleighzy]

You also have a bunch of mods in there. You might want to remove those for troubleshooting purposes to rule them out as well. Mods can often stop working or cause issues after DCS updates.

[GeoS72]

sleighzy,

I appreciate you taking a look. While most of these happened while using multi-thread, my last one was using the standard exe from the Bin folder. Additionally, all of this occurred while in the Mission Editor and NOT during game play. I believe ray tracing is off for the C-130 (Special Settings).

I use Reshade in the multi-thread exe and NO Reshade in the standard exe. I experienced this crash between MT and ST applications.

All video card drivers are current - 14 Nov is the latest. I suspect that "device removed" error was captured when windows tried to reload the display driver after the crash.

Regarding Mods: It is exceptionally rare that mods cause a crash. It is even more rate that they cause a crash while in the ME.

I would like to point out that a few updates ago, people complained of memory leaks that caused game crashes. Maybe this is another occurrence of that memory leak? Let's not forget: ED had to post a hotfix immediately after the 27 Nov update. People couldn't log in. Could this all be related?

Thanks for reminding me about clearing metashaders2 and fxo folders. I did not do that prior to starting up DCS. One thing is for sure: with 96GB of RAM, I shouldn't be running out of RAM while Mission Editing!

One final note: I do not overclock my video card, RAM, or CPU. It's all set to Auto.

[sleighzy]

No worries, just reporting on what the logs say occurred at the time. Out-of-memory and crash with video card (at least from the logs that weren’t corrupted). Fxo and metashaders2 have caused out of memory errors in the past. See how you get on since clearing those and continue to post more logs with further crashes.

Note there’s no such thing as ST and MT anymore, they’re both multithreaded now (identical) and the bin-mt folder will be removed in the future.

Dont believe related to the previous issue you mentioned, and haven’t seen any out-of-memory leak reports for this release (yet). 

Edited 9 hours ago by sleighzy