Whenever I go back from the engine or car editor to the main menu, about 95% of the time, my whole computer will crash after 0.72 to 0.75 seconds. Its not a game crash, the whole system halts, and if you shut the power off and reboot, it boots back up to system repair because “the last shutdown was unexpected”. Windows event viewer shows nothing, except for the fact that the last shutdown was unexpected. I’ve tried making a kernel dump or memory dump but it’s not possible because the system completely stops (there’s no bluescreen/bugcheck, its a complete halt). It’s been happening on this computer since I built it (from brand new parts), and on both Windows 10 and 11 (I’ve clean installed Windows three times at this point). It does not happen on Linux through proton. (I have dualbooted both Windows and Debian Testing in the past)
Now, you may be wondering, isn’t this just faulty hardware?
I have hundreds of games in my steam library that I play all the time. Automation is the only one that has ever caused my whole computer to halt, and it does it consistently. My temps never go above 70-75 degrees Celsius on any temperature sensor detected by HWiNFO during long gaming sessions (my cooling is overkill), and I have done no overclocking. I have updated my drivers, used older drivers, used third-party drivers, and used no drivers; with no change. I feel like I’ve tried every troubleshooting step on the planet.
Whenever the crash occurs, there’s sometimes a single corrupted frame before my screen goes black, which leads me to believe its something to do with my GPU. However, I know that whatever goes wrong does more than just blank my display, because any audio playing will suddenly stop, not like a normal stop, where it will finish whatever is in the audio buffer, but it very suddenly stops, making a loud pop noise as the dc offset suddenly returns to zero in my earbuds. Whenever I launch automation after a crash, it resets all of my settings about 50% of the time, so there’s at least some sort of crash detection being triggered. There’s also a small chance that the game will crash my computer right as the main menu loads after launch (<5%).
I think my next troubleshooting steps will be running the game on my integrated graphics (to completely rule out or verify my GPU theory) or maybe putting my GPU in someone else’s computer.
I’ve considered RMA’ing my GPU before but I’ve always ruled it out because I only ever had issues with automation, and I’m not entirely sure that it even is my GPU that is the cause of the issue.
Here’s my setup:
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/7Xvyvj
I submitted a bug report fourteen or so months ago about this to both Automation and AMD and nothing ever came of it…