Unreal Engine Crashing Using DX12 / Flickering / Melting Viewport when Opening external Windows

Development Getting Started & Setup
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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:

  • Screen flickering

  • “Melting” viewport

  • Freeze for a few seconds

  • EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION

  • Crashes when opening asset editors

  • 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:

  • NVIDIA 4070 Ti Super

  • Windows 11

  • NVIDIA Driver 581.57

  • Unreal Engine 5.6

This combination is broken by default.

  • UE5.6 uses an updated DX12 pipeline + Agility SDK

  • The 581.xx branch of NVIDIA drivers is tuned for AI workloads

  • 581.xx is unstable for DX12

  • 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:

:check_mark:576.88 — Risky ( Newer - recommend if you using multiple Softwares)**

:check_mark:552.22 — Stable (recommended - Work With Most )**

:check_mark:551.76 — Very stable

:check_mark:546.33 — Safe fallback (Too Old)

:warning: Do NOT use anything from the 58x branch.

Every 581.xx driver I tested caused DX12 instability in UE5.6.

I personally switched to 576.88 and Unreal is working perfectly again —

DX12, ray tracing, path tracing, everything.

Results After Downgrading

  • No more “melting” viewport

  • No flickering

  • No freeze when opening Material Editor

  • No EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION

  • DX12 stable again

  • 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:

  • a bad GPU

  • a PSU problem

  • Windows reinstall time

  • Unreal bug

  • overheating

  • plugins

  • shader cache

  • corrupted project

No.

It’s simply UE 5.6 + 58x NVIDIA drivers = disaster.

If you downgrade to 551.76 up to 576.88 , the problem disappears instantly.

Hope this saves someone the hell I went through.

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We spent two days looking through error logs, chasing shader and nanite ghosts, etc. Your recommendation to roll back the driver worked, we are stable once again, many thanks!

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thank you very much, saves my morning and my day!
I had this weird problem with the new drivers for both studio and game ready, doing clean install from any of then didn’t fixed

But as you recommended, clean install and downgrade to 576.88 looks like it fixed the issue, and everything on the UI is work as expected.

My unreal editor interface was like it getting ready to activate the hyperdriver and jump to another solar system, lmfao! and all I wanted is start my day work routine