Season 14 Crash/Full PC Freeze
EDIT 08/14/2022: The latest Nvidia hotfix driver (516.94) has prevented my PC from freezing during the crafting materials glitch, but NOT this glitch.
Since the release of the Season 14 patch, I am experiencing seemingly random freezes. These lock up my entire PC and force me to manually power cycle it (by holding the power button) in order to continue. This has cost me RP in ranked, as it counts as a match abandon.
During this time that it is frozen, audio hangs and repeats, any inputs do not produce a response (including OS commands like Ctrl+Alt+Delete, Ctrl+Shift+Win+B), and there does not appear to be any way to fix the issue short of rebooting.
This has occured 4-5 times over the past 48 hours, with no repeatable pattern of character selection, map location, system load, etc. It appears to be random.
I am unable to find anything in Windows crash logs (event viewer), Nvidia logs, Apex logs, etc, most likely due to this making the entire computer unresponsive. From my experience, I believe this to be an engine error, likely one that is crashing the video or audio driver in some way.
A similar crash has happened with previous seasons release patches, although these were typically the infamous "DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG" issue.
My guess is that I'm actually experiencing the "heartbeat" error that others have reported, but instead of crashing the game, it is also freezing my PC due to some unknown interaction (again, probably driver-related).
My specs:
- RTX 2070 Super
- i7-12700K
- 32GB RAM
- Game installed on an NVME
Other info:
- Latest Windows update, Nvidia drivers (516.94), Steam client, verified files, etc.
- Have completely removed all video and audio drivers with DDU and done a clean install.
- Have done a clean install of Windows.
- This entire PC was wiped and set up completely fresh several months back, in order to avoid any compatibility issues.
- Game mode is enabled.
- XMP is enabled.
- HAGS is disabled.
- Have stripped all non-essential programs. I don't even have GeForce Experience anymore.
- GPU has a completely stable OC that has been torture tested through every other game I own, and left running benchmarks for hours on end with zero issues. I also still have the crashes even if my OC is reverted.
- CPU is same as above.
- Apex doesn't even hit 80% utilization, since I cap it at 180fps.
- No power supply issues.
- No other hardware issues.
- This PC was fully rebuilt, from the ground up, when I wanted to clean the case and add some components.
- No incompatible software.
- Have tried completely reinstalling Apex.
- The only things running when I have the game launched are Apex, Discord, Nvidia Broadcast (in background, only for mic filtering), OBS in the background.
- OBS is only running the replay buffer using NVENC encoding.
- I can run literally any other game that I own for hours with zero stability issues.
- Entire build runs cool, no temp issues, no hardware instability.
- I monitor system performance with Afterburner + HWMonitor.
I understand that it's hard to go off of this with no system logs or error messages, but this is unfortunately all I can give you. Please let me know if any further information is needed.
