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. Fortnite and Dead by Daylight become stable when launched with the -dx11 option, but that workaround is unavailable or ineffective for the other games. Some titles run for a while before closing, while others crash sooner, and no error message appears.
I've tried changing game files and launch options, adjusting antivirus permissions, disabling overlays, updating my hardware and drivers, and reinstalling Windows. I'm running Windows 11 Pro 64-bit on an ASRock Z790 PG Lightning system with an Intel Core i7-14700KF, 32 GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. The system uses an iCUE LINK H150i RGB liquid cooler, and DirectX 12 is installed.
Since the crashes happen across different games and seem more common with DirectX 12, I'm wondering whether this points to a graphics card, processor, driver, BIOS, or other hardware stability problem. What should I check next, and how can I identify the cause without immediately replacing components?
5 Answers
Since you already reinstalled Windows, focus on collecting evidence instead of changing more settings at random. Record the crash time, check Reliability Monitor and Event Viewer, and test with BIOS defaults, current chipset and graphics drivers, and memory diagnostics. The logs should help separate a driver crash from GPU, CPU, RAM, or power-related instability.
Check Reliability Monitor and Event Viewer immediately after a crash. In Event Viewer, look under Windows Logs > System for WHEA-Logger errors, display-driver resets, or other critical events. Reliability Monitor can be easier to read because it shows the exact time the game stopped working and may identify whether Windows recorded a hardware or application fault.
Because DX11 makes some games stable while several unrelated DX12 games crash, the issue may be marginal hardware instability rather than a single game problem. Test the RTX 4070 Ti with a conservative stock configuration—no overclock, undervolt, or aggressive tuning—and check temperatures, power connections, and stability under a controlled GPU test.
Don’t overlook the i7-14700KF. Some 13th- and 14th-generation Intel desktop processors have had instability and degradation issues, especially under high power loads. Update the motherboard BIOS to a version with Intel’s recommended defaults and run Intel’s processor diagnostics. If WHEA errors or CPU test failures appear, the processor or motherboard settings may be responsible rather than the graphics card.
Try using Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) in Safe Mode to completely remove the NVIDIA driver and its settings, then install a fresh driver directly from NVIDIA. This also clears shader caches, so games may stutter briefly while they rebuild them. A normal driver update can leave behind corrupted files or settings that DDU removes.
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