Monday, July 30, 2018

PUBG Crashing

Recently I resolved 2 types of crashes occurring in PUBG:

1. Crashing display driver caused by PSU

No Signal message appears on the black screen of the monitor when the NVIDIA display driver crashes and the system reverts/recovers to the Microsoft Basic Display driver. This would happen within a few minutes of starting the game, sometimes while still in the lobby, sometimes a few minutes into a game. It would not occur if connecting to the onboard DVI connector (accelerated graphics are still available as long as a monitor is detected on the GPU card). System Event Log reported the following warning from source Display:
"Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered"
The cause was because the power supply only provided 11A on the 12v yellow power rail, which is insufficient to properly power the 6-pin connector on the GTX 1060 from Asus. Upgrading to a power supply with 18A available on the 12v connector fixed the problem. The 6-pin connector is expected to deliver up to 75W, see here for details: https://graphicscardhub.com/graphics-card-pcie-power-connectors/

This problem was only affecting me in PUBG - it must push the graphics card harder than most titles. After upgrading the power supply I have got through many games without a single crash.

2. Corrupted Data - OK

The second problem was getting disconnected with a "Corrupted Data" message in the middle of games. This occurred after having some bad sectors on my disk, even after verifying files in Steam. Backed up the game within Steam, then deleted the game. I didn't want to download another 17GB so I restored from the backup. Problem solved!