Lenovo Legion Pro 5 / RTX 4070 – screen goes black or turns into colored static in ARC Raiders but the game keeps running
TL;DR: While playing ARC Raiders my laptop screen randomly goes black or turns into weird green/pink/white/gray static. The weird thing is the game doesn't actually crash. I can still hear everything and can even move my character, but the display is completely gone. I've been troubleshooting this with ChatGPT for the last couple of days and we've tried pretty much everything I can think of. I'm hoping someone here has had the same issue.
Hey guys, I'm honestly getting pretty desperate with this so I'm hoping someone recognizes the problem.
I have a Lenovo Legion Pro 5 16IRX8 with an RTX 4070 Laptop GPU. While playing ARC Raiders, my screen will randomly die. Sometimes it goes completely black, other times it turns into what I can only describe as TV static/white noise with green, pink, white and gray pixels everywhere.
The strange part is that the game is still running. I can hear the game, Discord/etc. still works, and I can even move my character around. It's basically just the display that dies.
At first, putting the laptop to sleep with the power button and waking it back up would actually restore the screen without restarting the PC. Win + Ctrl + Shift + B didn't fix it and sometimes seemed to make things worse. Now the problem seems to be getting more unpredictable. Last night I got green pixels, today it was just a black screen, and after one of the crashes even closing the lid didn't properly put the laptop to sleep.
I've been using ChatGPT to troubleshoot it and we've gone pretty far down the rabbit hole. So far we've:
- Completely formatted/reinstalled Windows.
- Clean installed different NVIDIA drivers.
- Tried the newer NVIDIA 610.88 driver.
- Rolled all the way back to Lenovo's recommended OEM 560.94 driver. It still happened.
- Tested the laptop in dGPU mode, so it isn't simply switching to the integrated GPU when it happens.
- Tried DX11/windowed instead of the normal DX12 setup.
- Updated/checked the RTX 4070 VBIOS. It's 95.06.1E.00.98.
- Checked the motherboard BIOS. It's KWCN54WW, dated October 2025.
- Loaded BIOS defaults.
- Did the full power drain/EC reset.
- Opened the laptop, checked/cleaned the fans and cooling.
- Looked through Windows Reliability Monitor and analyzed the crash dumps with WinDbg.
Windows has actually created a LiveKernelEvent 193 / VIDEO_DXGKRNL_LIVEDUMP when this happened, with dxgkrnl!ProcessDeadlockThread. With ChatGPT's help I went through the full dump and we found NVIDIA (nvlddmkm.sys) involved in the display threads that were getting stuck.
I don't really know enough about kernel debugging to claim that means the GPU itself is dying, which is why I'm posting here.
Has anyone playing ARC Raiders had this exact problem? Not the game simply crashing to desktop — specifically the screen going black or becoming colored/static garbage while the game itself keeps running normally in the background.
I'm especially interested if anyone has seen this on a Legion Pro 5 / RTX 4070 laptop and managed to fix it, because at this point I'm running out of ideas and unfortunately the laptop is out of warranty.