So with this “new” (2019) computer I started, at some point, having issues with some games — only ever games, and not all of them — doing something odd:
- going to a black screen and then recovering after a pause of about two seconds
- going to a black screen, my monitors losing their color profile settings, and the game hanging
- a weird glitchy thing that happens semi-frequently but doesn’t interrupt gameplay.
I’m not sure when this started, but getting a second monitor seems to have made it worse. That second monitor is extremely useful when working from home and can be handy other times too (such as when making music).
At first I thought it was strictly an Art of Rally issue, because it happened after an update and at the time, that was the only game crashing. It was also after a graphics driver update, but I rolled back, tried beta drivers, etc. and nothing really seemed to help… until I went back to an even older driver and it seemed to stop.
And then another game would freak out with the black-screen-then-recover thing. And some games I tried on Steam would crash very quickly. And Art of Rally started doing it again.
I got a new video card a couple of months ago and it stopped. Aha! …and then it started again. Much more rare than before in Art of Rally, but still, it was happening. So were some other crashes though, after an update… so maybe not the card’s fault.
…except more games did it. Today, I picked up New Star GP which admittedly, just went into Early Access, and it had the exact same symptoms as Art of Rally. This new card is an AMD when the old one was an NVidia, so… it can’t be the card. Not overheating because it’s not even turning on the cooling fan. Power supply issues? Nah, I’m good (I intentionally went for relatively low wattage cards). Something else?
A quick Google search and I saw where someone else with a Ryzen CPU had weird issues with certain games crashing, and only games… ah. And their issue was the wrong RAM frequency set in their BIOS.
I checked and found mine was set to auto, but it said 2666 Mhz. That’s funny, the invoice for this computer says 3200. Either I got cheaper RAM than I paid for (and there are problems that look like this other person’s) or the board is just detecting the wrong speed. I set it to 3200, and we’ll see how that goes.
UPDATE: nope, it did not fix it. And I most likely was sent the wrong RAM… 4 years ago. I’m gonna go ahead and get some DDR4-3200 RAM because it’s fairly cheap to try it.