Frequent Crashes In-Game Requiring Reboot

Issues & Assistance
1

I have been experiencing rather regular crashes requiring a full reboot over the past several months, and I cannot quite nail down the triggers, as it seems to vary game-to-game. Sometimes during a pre-rendered cutscene. Sometimes if I am AFK. Sometimes without any clear reason.

For example: while playing Arc Raiders, if I leave the game AFK for a minute or two (e.g., not moving the cursor), the screen will freeze. This also occurs while playing Clair Obscur, during pre-rendered cutscenes. It occurs for other games as well, though often without rhyme or reason (working fine one second, then stone cold the next).

When such freezes occur, I am forced to close the game via system monitor. And after, I am unable to boot up the game again, or indeed any other game. A reboot will fix the issue insofar as I am able to boot up Steam and play games again, but I know that I’m just counting down to my next crash. During reboot, the screen will briefly display what I am assuming are elements of a crash log, but it is gone before I can really assess it.

I’ve done some research and I understand that drivers can be the culprit. I make certain that I keep my system up-to-date. I also understand that it may have to do with GPU power settings, though in honesty I am less certain in tweaking those.

Here are my system specifications:

Device: Laptop
Model: Alienware 18 Area-51

Software:
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.27.0
Qt Version: 6.11.1
Kernel Version: 7.0.12-1-cachyos (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland

Hardware:
Processors: 24 × Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX
Memory: 64 GiB of RAM (62.2 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor 1: Mesa Intel Graphics
Graphics Processor 2: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU/PCIe/SSE2

Please let me know if I can provide further information. Any assistance in resolving these crashes would be greatly appreciated.

2

first thing you need to do is debugging and checking the log
there is multiple way to do this
use steam in terminal so you can check the log directly
or
use PROTON_LOG=1 in game launch command with additional env like log path etc
or
use sudo dmesg -w to monitoring the error in real time
or
use journalctl -b -p 3 to check last error log after game crashed

then after that, you can start debugging with the error msg you got

my first guess would be GPU driver crash (since you said you need to do a reboot to make it works again)

3

I played a game until it crashed, (in this case Clair Obscur, during a pre-rendered cutscene) then generated a report using journalctl -b -p 3. I’ve pasted the output to pastebin here (in an effort to be less obnoxious): Error Report - Pastebin.com

In all honesty, I am not sure I know how to interpret this. A point that sticks out to me is:

GSP task exception: instruction access page fault (cause:0xc)

On a quick search, I find some previous discussion of load access faults, but not instruction access faults.

Any further guidance would be appreciated.

4

you might want to check this

as i’m not using nvidia gpu, seems driver issue tbh
recent post have some command that might working there

or this

sad i can’t help much, you should seeking help in nvidia forum / github i guess if both option didn’t works

5

Not at all, thank you for your help.

Unfortunately I now have a new problem. I tried switching from open to proprietary drivers to see if that would help, but I messed up somewhere. On reboot, it’s just showing a blank screen.

Device will boot up. I’ll then enter decryption and get brought to the Grub menu. From there, OS will start to boot (will flash CachyOS) logo, but then will just display a black screen with a cursor at top-left.

If anyone can walk me through a fix I would appreciate it. I’m terrified of screwing things up further at this point.

Edit: I’m starting another thread on this topic.