I am running into a weird issue when trying to use the path tracer in my Unreal Engine project. What’s odd is that I’ve been able to use the path tracer in the past on this PC and I’m not sure what’s changed since the time it was working.
I’m able to use the path tracer on my other PC which is running the same project via Perforce source control. The only difference is that PC is a 4090 while the problem PC is a 5090.
Essentially what happens is when I try to switch the viewport to Path tracing mode, all of my static meshes turn black and It says that shaders are being prepared in the top left of my viewport. Then after 30 seconds or so it issues a GPU dump and crashes. As soon as I switch the viewport mode to path tracing my PC essentially freezes up and I can’t do anything until it crashes.
I really am at a loss. I have already tried these solutions:
- Updated to latest GPU Drivers
- Downgraded to Dec. 2025 Drivers
- Verified UE5.5 Install
- Lowered Sample Count for Path Tracing
- Deleted “Saved, Intermediate, & DerivedDataCache” folders then regenerated upon launch
- Increased Virtual Texture Pool Size to 4000mb
- Disabled Virtual Textures
Here is the crash report and log (looks like a typical GPU dump crash):
LakeAve.log (15.5 MB)
GPU Crash dump Triggered
UnrealEditor_D3D12RHI
UnrealEditor_D3D12RHI
UnrealEditor_D3D12RHI
UnrealEditor_D3D12RHI
UnrealEditor_D3D12RHI
UnrealEditor_Core
UnrealEditor_Core
kernel32
ntdll