Alrighty, so I got quite the doozy for everyone today, so bear with me and hear me out, I’d be beyond grateful just for that and if possible some incentive on just what the heck to do about all this of course;
Ever since the new Nvidia driver; 461.09, my Unreal Engine across ALL engine version has broken drastically to the point where it’s almost impossible to even use. In all my five years of working day in and day out with the engine, I’ve never come across such as drastic group of hitches, and honestly the only thing I could draw back to every time I tried to figure out why, led back to this driver. Ever since I had it installed, which was probably around this past week, I’ve had some serious hitches. Two of them are huge:
- Upon fullscreening any project in any engine version (primarily between 4.25 and 4.26) my engine has a very high chance to completely shut down and not respond at all, after a min or two that is, and after a second or two of it realizing it is unresponsive, it also COMPLETELY freezes my pc. I am left with no choice but to hard reset. Only happens when I fullscreen the editor, could be in anything, any level.
- PIE now crashes the editor nearly every time, even new windows. Standalone is fine, and builds are obviously normal.
- Editor interfaces now become completely unresponsive after an hour or two + of using the editor in any project or version. I will provide a video later after this is posted if I can, to show you what I mean. The windows disappear after being clicked, everything I try to do in the editor is now rendered impossible. I cannot do a thing after a while of using the editor, I am forced to restart it when it occurs. Occurs particularly with dropdowns, for instance; I select the modes panel at the top and it flickers then disappears, I click it again, flickers and goes away instantly. It does nothing any longer.
And yea, that’s about it, its beyond frustrating, all of this, today I experienced it the most, and learned it also occurred in versions other than 4.26,4.25 as well.
*My hardware config is as follows: An Alienware M17 (No R version just the M17 Laptop), a Intel Core i7 8750H, an installed 32 Gb of dual channeled DDR4 ram, 2070 Max-Q with 8gb of Vram, running on Windows 10.
-Worth noting: No stupid ■■■■ is enabled on my laptop like Nvidia battery boost (which I saw mentioned anyways), etc. I have no idea how to fix this anymore. Also worth noting, I recently upgraded my memory to the 32 Gb from 16, although before this driver, I still had no issues, everything has been fine. Although, today I noticed my power usage on nearly all apps hitting the “very high” mark super quick. I have no idea whether this is normal for things like Unreal Engine, or if I should be concerned at taking a look at the battery or heat sync (although temps seem to have not changed, and neither have paged or nonpaged pools in the memory, everything seems normal stat-wise).
*Edit: I learned the power usage stats were actually normal, and it wasn’t anything to be of concern. I cannot test rolling back my drivers unless I am able to manually configure them (which I’m really on the fence about since everything is automatic these days with Geforce experience). For some reason my last installed drivers are no longer available on this PC, I might be screwed until the next GPU driver update, or alternatively maybe it’s forcing DX 12 on all my projects that still use DX 11 or what is considered Default for Windows in UE4 as of this moment in time. Not sure, but I guess I’ll find out.
*Edit #2: Going to try the studio driver, 460.89 and see what happens.
*Edit #3: Wow, I did not think I’d come back to this but another studio driver rolled out, and also broke my unreal engine. Same issues, took about the same time to show up, 30 minutes or so and a hard reset had to be made. I’m really starting to wonder what the hell Nvidia is doing in these drivers that is literally destroying my PC…doesn’t even seem like an exaggeration at this point, its just insane how this never happened before. Great. IF YOU ARE HAVING OR HAVE HAD THESE ISSUES DO NOT INSTALL THE NEW STUDIO DRIVER 461.40. IT WILL ALSO BREAK YOUR ENGINE. Gonna try running in DX12 mode only.
*Edit #4, Final: Altering dx settings inside of the editor did not change the terrible hard crashes these new drivers have managed to cause every time I install them. Installations / uninstallations between these drivers have worked fine, no errors or hitches during, only use after they were installed. So I was forced to go back to the studio driver previous, that solved this all for me, 460.89. To no surprise it worked once again, and so far almost a whole day through today and no issues like this morning when I installed that new one I mentioned above. Don’t know what’s going on with them, but something is up could be a lot of things I suppose, but I guess I’ll just not update until I know exactly what is going on. Hope this little “study” helps anyone who is having similar issues.
