Crashes even with ALL troubleshooting done

mariadigner​  Thanks for the dxdiag, but it's full of BlueScreens, to the point where that's the only error listed.  This is the BSOD type if you're curious:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/bug-check-0xf7--driver-overran-stack-buffer

Would you like to address this first?  Despite the text of the article, this isn't necessarily about malware; the point is that malware can look like this, so any driver behaving badly in precisely this way is suspect, according to Windows.

To find out which driver is the culprit, you'd need to find more info, probably by analyzing a crash dump.  I can do that for you, if you'd like.  Open C:\Windows\Minidump, copy the most recent three files to the desktop, zip them together, upload the .zip to a third-party filesharing site, and either link it here or send me the link via PM.

For the Sims 4 issue, I'd need to know what kind of crash you're getting.  Let the game crash again, then look for new errors in the Reliability Monitor.  Click Windows key-R and enter "perfmon /rel" without quotes, and you'll see a chart of errors and updates with a column for each day.  Today is on the right.

Look for an error that happened at exactly the time of your most recent Sims 4 crash.  If you find one, double-click it to see more details, then copy that info and paste it into a reply here.  If you don't see a new error, check back in an hour or so—the Reliability Monitor doesn't always update right away.

Thank you for taking the time to dig into this and actually help, I really appreciate it.

Quick update: last night I rolled back the GPU driver to version 25.10.2, and since then I haven’t had any Blue Screens at all. That said, The Sims 4 is still crashing.

I’ve attached my Reliability Monitor, which shows the most recent Sims crash.

Also the most recent minidump files = https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x6jSa1qytRN9PUq9qGVJXZ8nny1EVRT6/view?usp=sharing          — these are from before the driver version change, but I figured they might still be worth looking at.

I’m also attaching the LastCrash.txt file and a new dxdiag, just in case they help.

Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like me to check or test.

mariadigner​  The Reliability Monitor report lists amdxx64.dll as the faulting module, and that's a component of the AMD graphics driver.  Did you roll back the "normal" way, or did you do a clean uninstall of the newer driver before reinstalling the old one?  That would be the next step here.

https://crinrict.com/blog/2019/02/clean-re-install-of-graphics-drivers-with-display-driver-uninstaller-ddu.html

You can get a few different older drivers here, although skip any "optional" (not WHQL) versions:

https://www.amd.com/en/support/downloads/previous-drivers.html/processors/ryzen/ryzen-8000-series/amd-ryzen-5-8500g.html

I will take a look at the minidump files when I'm in front of a Windows computer again, likely later tonight.

puzzlezaddict​ hii

The first time I rolled back the driver, I actually did a clean uninstall using DDU, and then installed the 25.10.2 AMD version. But the Device Manager showed the driver with Microsoft-style numbering, even with the AMD Adrenalin software still opening normally and showing the exact version I had installed. Just in case, I later reinstalled again the “normal” way through Windows/Adrenalin because I thought I might have forgotten to disable automatic driver updates before, and I wanted to make sure Windows wasn’t interfering. But it still appears as the driver provider "Advance Micro Devices Inc" and on the AMD the actual driver I installed, so I’m not completely sure whether Windows actually replaced the driver, or if it was just the way it’s displayed in Device Manager.

Given that, would you still recommend running DDU again and reinstalling a different WHQL version from the previous drivers page?

Thanks again for your help!!!

mariadigner​  Given where you are in the process, I would definitely suggest running DDU again and trying a slightly older driver.  It's easy enough to update.  I also wouldn't worry about the version mismatch.  If you look at the AMD driver release notes, you'll see something like "this will install driver version 32.xxx.xx.xxxx" , which is the version you see in a dxdiag.  I don't know why AMD has its own special version numbers, but that's just how things are set up.

Hi! puzzlezaddict​ 

I understand this probably goes beyond a pure Ts4 issue at this point, so I don’t want to throw unrelated stuff at you, but since your advice has been the most helpful so far, I’d really appreciate your opinion.

Quick update:

I used DDU and installed driver 25.8.1. I played for about an hour and got a silent crash. Then I switched the game to DX9, and it ran fine without mods. After that, I added some build CC, played for around 30 minutes, and the game froze and went to a black screen, which also froze, so I had to turn it off manually.

In Reliability Monitor I’m seeing: 

• BEX64 crash (c0000005) in TS4_x64.exe pointing to ntdll.dll.
• LiveKernelEvent – Code a1000005
• Dump file named AMD_WATCHDOG-xxxx.dmp
• BlueScreen – Code 133 (DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION)

Also here is the link to a new generated minidump:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kF_hLMDx44oO_15HG17DX5w-EXeJjxmY/view?usp=sharing

I’ve been troubleshooting step by step with chatgpt, and it suggested I increase the iGPU (Radeon 740M) memory allocation in the BIOS to 2GB (it’s currently 1GB reserved for hardware). The idea is that this might help if the crashes are related to iGPU VRAM saturation under load. Updating the BIOS was also suggested if that doesn't work (I’m currently on version 3.30).

What do you think? 😣