After weeks of Unreal Engine 5.6 behaving like my GPU was melting every time I opened an external window (Material Editor, Blueprint, Niagara, etc.), I finally figured out what’s causing it — and more importantly, how to fix it.
This post is for anyone running a 4070 / 4080 / 4090 (Ada GPUs) and dealing with:
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Screen flickering
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“Melting” viewport
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Freeze for a few seconds
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EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION
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Crashes when opening asset editors
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DX12 instability
Switching to DX11 only hides the problem. It doesn’t fix anything, and you lose ray tracing + path tracing.
Why This Happens
I’m on:
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NVIDIA 4070 Ti Super
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Windows 11
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NVIDIA Driver 581.57
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Unreal Engine 5.6
This combination is broken by default.
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UE5.6 uses an updated DX12 pipeline + Agility SDK
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The 581.xx branch of NVIDIA drivers is tuned for AI workloads
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581.xx is unstable for DX12
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The new UE5.6 Editor Viewport changes trigger crashes on Ada GPUs
So if you’re using 581.57, it’s not your GPU, not your PSU, not overheating —
it’s the driver + UE 5.6 misbehaving.
THE FIX
Downgrade your NVIDIA driver to any of these stable versions:
552.22 — Stable (recommended)
551.76 — Very stable
546.33 — Safe fallback
Do NOT use anything from the 58x branch.
Every 581.xx driver I tested caused DX12 instability in UE5.6.
I personally switched to 552.22 and Unreal is working perfectly again —
DX12, ray tracing, path tracing, everything.
Results After Downgrading
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No more “melting” viewport
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No flickering
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No freeze when opening Material Editor
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No EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION
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DX12 stable again
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Ray tracing + path tracing fully functioning
UE 5.6 returns to normal.
Why I’m Posting This
I saw a lot of people fighting the same issue and wasting days thinking it’s:
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a bad GPU
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a PSU problem
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Windows reinstall time
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Unreal bug
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overheating
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plugins
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shader cache
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corrupted project
No.
It’s simply UE 5.6 + 58x NVIDIA drivers = disaster.
If you downgrade to 552.22 or 551.76, the problem disappears instantly.
Hope this saves someone the hell I went through.