For more than a year, several online games—including Fortnite, Dead by Daylight, PEAK, R.E.P.O., Split Fiction, and Halloween: The Game—have been crashing unexpectedly. Some games can run for a while before closing, while others crash sooner, and none display an error message. Switching Fortnite and Dead by Daylight to DirectX 11 with the -dx11 launch option helped, but the other games either do not support that workaround or still crash.
I've tried changing game files, adjusting antivirus permissions, modifying startup settings, updating my hardware and drivers, disabling overlays, and even reinstalling Windows. Nothing has solved the problem. My system uses Windows 11 Pro 64-bit, an Intel Core i7-14700KF, 32 GB of RAM, an RTX 4070 Ti, and an ASRock Z790 PG Lightning motherboard with an iCUE LINK H150i RGB water cooler.
Since the crashes happen across multiple game engines and seem more common with DirectX 12, could this be GPU or CPU instability, a driver problem, or something else? What logs or diagnostic tests should I check before replacing any hardware?
4 Answers
Check Reliability Monitor and Event Viewer immediately after a crash. Look under Windows Logs > System for WHEA-Logger events, display-driver errors, or messages indicating a graphics driver reset. Reliability Monitor can sometimes show the failing application or module more clearly than the game itself.
Try using Display Driver Uninstaller in Safe Mode to completely remove the NVIDIA driver and its leftover settings, then install a fresh driver. A clean driver reset can also clear shader caches, so the first few launches may stutter while shaders are rebuilt. Since you already reinstalled Windows, it’s worth confirming whether that reinstall was truly clean and whether the current driver was installed afterward.
Don’t overlook the i7-14700KF. Some 13th- and 14th-generation Intel desktop processors have had instability and degradation problems, especially under heavy workloads. Update the motherboard BIOS to a version with the current Intel default power settings, then run Intel’s processor diagnostic tools and a separate memory test. CPU instability can cause inconsistent crashes that survive a Windows reinstall and vary from game to game.
The fact that DirectX 11 helps in some games while several unrelated DirectX 12 games crash points toward marginal hardware instability rather than one specific game. DX12 workloads can expose problems that DX11 does not. Test the RTX 4070 Ti at stock settings, remove any overclock or undervolt, and monitor temperatures and power behavior.
That makes sense because the crashes are inconsistent and don’t seem tied to one particular game. I’ll check the BIOS power settings, WHEA entries, and run the Intel and memory diagnostics before assuming the graphics card is defective.