Apex crashes on launch after Nvidia driver update
Hey everyone,
I've come across a very frustrating issue. I was running Nvidia's driver of December 2023 for a good while. I decided to update my drivers earlier this month to the driver released on 24/01, which caused my Apex to crash on launch (before I even got into the lobby). The only way it didn't crash was by changing power plan to energy saving. So I reverted back to the December update which worked fine on any power plan. The reversion continued to work fine until the S20 update. After that I had to revert back to the energy saving plan, even on the drivers of December that worked fine prior to the season launch.
Now I updated to the driver of 24/01, since I have to run both on energy saving anyway. It makes no difference anymore. The recent Nvidia driver update of 13/02 makes everything worse. I checked in task manager what the issue could be, and I see my CPU spikes up to 100% usage while trying to load into the game just as it crashes.
Do you guys have any idea what the issue could be? Looking for an issue on the interwebs this past month has given me numerous headaches. I was thinking that it could be an insufficient power issue, so I turned undervolting protection on for my CPU in my BIOS, but alas... no fix. But then again, can driver updates really change required power that much? I've tried verifying the game files, EAC, running on DX12, capping framerates, etc. I've not tampered with any CPU or GPU settings, other than turning undervolting protection on.
In 95% of the cases, it crashes to desktop, but it has blue screened my PC on some attempts too, giving stopcode CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT.
My specs:
GPU: GeForce RTX 4070 Ti
CPU: Intel Core i9-13900K
- MOBO: Z790 AORUS ELITE AX DDR4
- OS: Windows 11
- Platform: Steam AND EA
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
