Hello everyone,
I’ve done some serious googling and I’ve tried to fix this with several solutions. It’s not a GPU or D3D crash, and I’ve made sure that all the checkboxes in options in the epic launcher such as starter content, templates and feature packs, engine source, and editor symbols for debugging have all been checked( I did not however check the boxes for additional platform support). I also encounter this problem when using a fresh project file, and I’ve tried reinstalling my Nvidia drivers for both game ready and studio ready drivers, plus the second time around I did a fresh install on studio drivers, with no difference at all. There’s also no crash log at all with any of these crashes. This also occurs on the right-click dropdown menu, and it specifically occurs when I have highlighted a option in the dropdown menus that has a secondary dropdown. If I stay away from the menus, I can navigate the content browser, use blueprints, and otherwise go about my day as normal, but this is very frustrating. If it matters, the template I’m using is the third person game template.
Hey there @PsychoticReaper0! Welcome to the community! Since we’re unable to retrieve a crash log here, let’s first try to determine the nature of the freezing. Oftentimes as you’re aware it can be graphically related, but not always in the most obvious ways. In any case, a couple of questions!
May I know your specs?
What engine version is causing this issue?
Is it only this version?
When the menus begin to drop, do they appear or does it freeze before they are created?
When this occurs, does it lock just the application up or does it tie up more resources on your machine?
I’m using a laptop with a i7-9750H with a Nvidia 1660 Ti. It’s got 16 GB of ram with a 2TB SSD. The engine version I’m using is 5.2.1, and I have not tested other versions, I will try to do that today. The menus do appear, and if I’m fast enough, I can select an option so getting to the project settings page is possible without crashing. When I’m bringing up the dropdown menus, it isn’t drawing more resources while it’s frozen, so just locking the application. I did try a reinstall of UE 5.2.1, which seemed to fix it for a short time, but then it started occurring again. I’m currently installing UE 5.0.3, so I’ll test that once it downloads and see if I have the same issue.
Update! When I loaded into UE 5.0.3, I had no issues at all whatsoever. Dropdowns worked just fine with no freezing at all whatsoever. I then opened up a fresh third person game project on 5.2.1 that I named crashtest1, and had no issues at all whatsoever. I THEN opened up the project that I originally had the issue again, and the issue occurred with the dropdown menus and crashing back to the Epic Launcher. I then reopened crashtest1, and had no issues again. So I think it’s safe to say that the problem is with the game project that I’m working on. Thing is, I’ve only done two things in it: I’ve gone into project settings and added a single action mapping under inputs bound to V(and another one that was bound to R, but that one got deleted without ever being used/programmed for), and added a blueprint into the third person control blueprint that (using the action input that I created with V in project settings) literally just swaps between two cameras, one at the player’s head, and the other at the default third person perspective with a tutorial that I found on YouTube. If you’d like to reference the video, here’s a LINK to the video. Thing is, it works just fine, and never once did I crash UE5 activating the command, and I did spam it probably about 40-50 times to ensure it could stand up to the abuse that I’d like it to handle. (fyi, I am very new to UE5, so for all I know, the code I added is bugged and is the reason UE5 is crashing, but don’t think so.
One more thing I’d like to mention is that even though my laptop isn’t the greatest, I’ve never had any lag or difficulties working with it previous times. So I am disinclined to say that it’s because my laptop can’t handle it, though that very well might be the case after all. Thanks for reading!
Interesting! Great information! (Usually) project setting changes won’t cause crashes, so it may be something else altogether. Since the changes to that project were minor, would it be possible to make similar changes to a base project to see if you can recreate it?
So here’s what I did (for UE 5.2.1): I created a new project and followed the tutorial exactly, but the one thing I changed was I used a node for the V key input directly in the blueprint rather than make a enhanced input action for it in the project settings. Tested that, worked perfectly fine. I kid you not, less than 30 seconds after creating the enhanced input action tied to the V key, I start getting the exact problem again as I’m literally going back to select the Edit dropdown, click the dropdown, and UE 5.2.1 crashes, but I do get a glimpse of the dropdown long enough to verify that it did appear. I also tested this in 5.0.3, and fortunately even after creating the input action, UE5 did not crash at all whatsoever. One thing that did catch my eye though is that while browsing dropdown menus, I’d get slight graphical glitches in my UE5 window as a whole; specifically, for a split second, I could see the window behind my UE 5.0.3 UI/window. I’m not sure if it’s showing my desktop, or YouTube as that’s the window behind my UE5 screen, but it is there. For the record, I only noticed it after I made the change in project settings to add the action input, and it might just be my computer, but more details almost never hurt imo. Hope this helps!
That is… interesting! It’s almost definitely something environmental due to the visual artifacting. Though without any spikes or crashes it’d be hard to diagnose at all. I’ve got more drastic GPU based fixes that could help, but they may not work here since this seems like an entirely different issue.
Before that, do you use a High DPI monitor? Do you use shadowplay or any of Nvidias GPU accessors while in engine?
My screen isn’t high DPI(only 1920x1080 resolution), and I don’t screw around with NVIDIA stuff at all. After double-checking GeForce Experience, I don’t have any of those options like shadowplay. I’m not sure what you mean by GPU accessors, but unless they come turned on by default, they aren’t enabled.
Update on the graphical artifacting: It’s not showing what’s behind my screen, it’s glitching and showing multicolored static. It can range from covering a quarter of my screen to barely a few rows, but it is always at the very bottom of my screen, and it occurs specifically when I’m browsing dropdown menus, but I notice it most when I’m scrolling though the node selection list in Blueprints, which is one of the few dropdowns I can use without UE 5.2.1 crashing at all. If I’m scrolling really fast, it occurs more often. It also occurred when I accessed the Project settings window, and I did manage to delete the action keybind which seems to have stopped the crashing, but now it’s artifacting. Hope this helps.
That’s even more odd, generally with visual artifacting like that it’s major graphical issues. Alright, so I have 2 threads, one I know you’ve seen before but the other is a bit different. They are not for the same issue but generally assist with all graphical issues.
Does this still occur if you change the RHI to DirectX 11 or Vulkan in your project settings or DefaultEngine.ini?
Here’s one that fixes a bunch of very esoteric issues but loses the Geforce experience altogether.