TÓPICO 5 — Crash Observability
Título
Battlefield 6 – Crash Observability & Automated Root-Cause Diagnostics
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Technical Proposal: Crash Observability and Automated Root-Cause Diagnostics
A crash report stating only that “the game crashed” provides limited engineering value.
Modern crash diagnostics can capture enough context to help developers identify recurring failure patterns automatically.
Battlefield 6 could benefit from a unified crash-observability pipeline across supported platforms.
1. Crash Signature Clustering
Crashes should be automatically grouped according to common signatures.
Examples include:
CPU exception location.
Call stack.
GPU fault signature.
Out-of-memory condition.
Driver/device-removal event.
Subsystem involved.
Build version.
This allows engineers to identify whether thousands of crash reports represent one bug or hundreds of unrelated problems.
2. GPU Crash Diagnostics
GPU crashes can be particularly difficult because the visible failure can occur after the command that originally caused the problem.
On supported PC APIs, post-mortem diagnostics can capture information such as GPU execution breadcrumbs and page-fault data.
Equivalent platform-native diagnostics should be used where available on consoles.
3. Contextual Metadata
A crash record could contain non-personal technical context such as:
Game build.
Platform.
GPU.
GPU driver.
CPU class.
Memory configuration.
Map.
Game mode.
Graphics configuration.
Recent asset-streaming pressure.
Recent memory pressure.
Relevant error codes.
4. Timeline Before Failure
Maintaining a small rolling diagnostic buffer could help determine what happened immediately before the crash.
For example:
Map transition.
Asset load.
Device removal.
Memory allocation failure.
Shader/pipeline event.
Network transition.
Destruction event.
5. Out-of-Memory Classification
Not all crashes have the same cause.
The diagnostic system should distinguish:
System RAM exhaustion.
VRAM pressure.
Memory leak.
Fragmentation.
Allocation failure.
Unexpected asset residency growth.
6. Privacy
Diagnostics should collect only the technical information necessary for reliability analysis and follow applicable privacy requirements.
Engineering Metrics
Crash-free session percentage.
Crashes per thousand gameplay hours.
Top crash signatures.
GPU-hang rate.
Out-of-memory rate.
Mean time to identify a regression.
Mean time to resolve major crash clusters.
Crash rate by build.
Final Objective
The goal should not simply be to collect more crash reports.
It should be to transform crashes into structured, searchable and reproducible engineering evidence.
Every major crash should become easier to classify, reproduce and eliminate.
On Windows/D3D12, Microsoft's DRED is a concrete example of this approach: it provides GPU workload breadcrumbs and page-fault information specifically for post-mortem device-removal debugging.
