TL;DR: I'm pretty sure I've isolated at least part of the problem in the sense that with cloud gaming it becomes visible because it uses multple GPUs as well as hard drives so the problem persists past the first cloning. Clearing the screen (running the garbage collector) temporarily fixes the problem on cloud, but if the installed version has to render it all on it's own it'll fail. (the last paragraph is probably unrelated)
Yeah after comparing the issue with the shaders on cloud gaming 25 to the installed trial for 26 I'd bet money that the shaders start to layer the models on cloud gaming which is when it'll crash if it's only running on one machine. 25Cloud also starts to noticeabley chug after enough of the models get layered that the shadows either make all the skins dark and muddy from one side of the light, then the layered reflections make them super bright on the other. The models themselves all look exactly the same so just mapping the textures means the models themselves don't change colour, but the shadows aren't in a file, they're calculated so when the model gets duplicated only the shadows and reflections get layered making one side darker and one side lighter.
Also I found an almost solution for the cloud gaming version. If you change from one view to another (I use overhead and zone) then it seems to run the garbage collector on all those cloned models making it chug less and the skaters display properly. Unfortunately this doesn't work for an installed copy that's already crashed by trying to render twice the number of actors it was meant to, and also doesn't solve the issue with some form of memory leak still being there, but I'm pretty sure it at least demonstrates that multiples of models end up being rendered on top of each other and that's the issue.
I also doubt that this part has anything to do with it, but there's also a minor bug in the cuts between plays where it shows the scores, but only during the playoffs and only after having simmed at least one game. Luckily it doesn't affect any of the objectives when the top player erroneously shows hundreds of hits and/or goals in the leaderboards between plays, but that number is coming from somewhere and I would guess that it's a call to the memory location (or up to the first 3 digits of it converted to decimal) rather than the value itself, but the list can't be drawn directly from the score table or else it wouldn't keep displaying the wrong info for the same character repeatedly. Maybe the error causing the game to restart drawing the models gets thrown when the trigger that updates that list is activated... but I'd agree that those are more likely separate issues since it doesn't happen during season play, but it does crash.
