I recently built my first PC after more than 20 years, investing around $5,000 into it, and it runs perfectly—except for Call of Duty, which crashes frequently. I have a 9800x3d processor running at 4.70 GHz, a TUF Gaming B650e-e motherboard, a PNY 5090 graphics card, and 32 GB of RAM (6000 MT/s with EXPO enabled in the BIOS). Despite being able to play other demanding games like Battlefield 6, Cyberpunk, and Diablo 4 without issues, COD crashes, taking me back to the desktop without any error messages. Sometimes the system locks up and reboots, but usually, it's just a desktop crash that occurs randomly after anywhere from 4 hours to just a few minutes of gameplay. I've tried removing all undervolts, resetting everything to stock settings, and ensuring BIOS, Windows, and all drivers are current. I've even tested various Nvidia drivers, but the issue persists. I'm not sure how to troubleshoot this properly!
5 Answers
I recommend running a stress test on both your CPU and GPU to monitor their temperatures. If the system crashes during the test, it might indicate heat issues. If not, the problem could lie within COD or with your drivers. Don't forget to verify the integrity of the game files or consider reinstalling if needed. If overheating isn't the issue during testing, try resetting your BIOS to optimized defaults and check for BIOS updates.
It sounds like you might have a GPU driver issue or some setting causing trouble in your Nvidia dashboard. Do you have ray tracing turned on? Sometimes those settings can cause instabilities in certain games.
There are utilities that can analyze crash dumps from whenever your game crashes. I used one recently to identify an issue with my BIOS/OS when virtualization was enabled. Turning it off helped stop my crashes altogether. You might want to give that a shot!
This sounds frustrating! The game has a history of crashing for various reasons. Before getting too deep into hardware troubleshooting, have you considered reinstalling Windows? It could help rule out any software conflicts. Just make sure to back up your important files first! If it still crashes post-reinstall, then it might lean towards a hardware issue, but that seems unlikely since you've had no problems with other games.
It might help to look at your RAM. How many sticks do you have? Some users have found that turning off EXPO/XMP can help with stability. Also, be sure to run a clean install of your Nvidia drivers using DDU, selecting driver only and avoiding GeForce Experience. You could also try clearing the COD shader cache and letting it rebuild.
I've already done the DDU process a few times and turned EXPO off, but I can try clearing the shader cache again.
No, ray tracing is turned off.