Game freezing and crashing after recent AMD driver update
This was working perfectly fine until a couple of days ago when I updated my graphics driver, but once it was updated I started experiencing screen glitches/artefacting and then the game would completely freeze and I'd have to alt+ctrl+del out, which took a minute to respond, and then I'd get a directx error saying something like "getdeviceremovedreason"
I tried rolling back my gpu driver, updating directx and updating most drivers in general but this still occurs.
I do use mods, but no new ones were installed recently and all of my graphics options are the same, and I do overclock my gpu but all overclock settings are the same and I've gone through several playthroughs using these settings. The only change I can see is this driver update, and the crashes began almost immediately after said update.
I don't know if this is a bad driver update, or the overclocking, or something in the update clashing with the game, or worst case if my gpu is dying (it has only been in use for roughly three months though)
So I followed your advice to the point of reverting my overclock settings and I've found what I believe is the issue. I use GPUTweak to overclock my card a little. The driver update caused the GPU native software to apply its own overclock settings on top of GPUTweak's settings, but only when the game was open. It took using a GPU monitoring overlay for me to notice what was happening.
To clarify with some numbers.
Base GPU clock speed when gaming is 1300MHz. I set GPUTweak to overclock this to 1323MHz (+23MHz). But after the update the GPU software (Radeon Software) was also adding +23MHz, but only while the game was open so I didn't notice this when looking through the GPU settings. This brought the total clock speed to 1346MHz, which is an unstable setting and I know for a fact does cause screen freezing on my PC.
Played for a couple of hours after fixing these settings and no crash so far, so I strongly suspect this was the problem. While I may seem quite calm in the wording of this message, please be assured that I am in fact quite livid at such an inane problem to be caused by a driver update, hence my long message as a means to vent my anger. Thank you for your help, the step by step led me to the problem.
