Deadlock keeps crashing on my RTX 4090 / i9-14900K even after a fresh Windows reinstall
I’m genuinely losing my mind with Deadlock at this point.
My specs:
RTX 4090
Intel i9-14900K
32GB DDR5
Gigabyte B760 AORUS ELITE AX
Windows 11
NVIDIA driver 610.47 / 32.0.16.1047
The game keeps crashing constantly. Sometimes mid-game, sometimes around loading, sometimes after only a few minutes. Other games like Rainbow Six Siege work fine, so this doesn’t feel like my whole PC is broken.
At first I thought it was software junk or overlays, because earlier crash dumps showed things like Steam overlay, Medal hook, Norton/aswhook, NVIDIA capture, etc. So I went nuclear.
I did:
Fresh Windows reset
Fresh Steam install
Fresh Deadlock install
Clean NVIDIA driver
No Norton
No Medal
No Discord
No Gigabyte Control Center
Steam Overlay off
Steam Cloud off
Game Recording off
XMP off
DX11 tested
Vulkan tested
Low settings tested
FPS capped
DLSS off
Reflex off
BIOS changed away from Extreme / Spec Enhance
E-cores disabled, running only 8 P-cores / 16 threads
And it still crashes.
The dumps keep pointing to Source 2 / rendering / NVIDIA-related stuff like:
materialsystem2.dll
scenesystem.dll
tier0.dll
rendersystemdx11.dll
rendersystemvulkan.dll
nvwgf2umx.dll
nvgpucomp64.dll
Reliability Monitor also showed a Windows Hardware Error / LiveKernelEvent 193 at one point.
The cursed part is that I tested both DX11 and Vulkan after the fresh Windows reset, and both still crashed. At this point it feels very Deadlock-specific, or something between Deadlock / Source 2 / NVIDIA / RTX 4090 / 14900K.
TL;DR: Deadlock crashes nonstop on my RTX 4090 + i9-14900K setup. I did a fresh Windows reset, clean driver, no overlays, XMP off, E-cores off, DX11 and Vulkan tested, and it still crashes. Other games work. Anyone else with a similar setup dealing with this cursed little bastard?
EDIT / UPDATE: possible fix found
huge thanks to everyone who commented and helped me chase this cursed little bastard down, especially the people who kept pointing at the CPU like Ambitious_Bee1090, Asas621, Godzillian123, NewestAccount2023, Miguethor, and a few others.
turns out one of the biggest problems was me refusing to believe my expensive ass CPU might be the criminal here. emotionally, i was not ready to accept that my 14900K might be acting deficient. truely heartbreaking. my heart aches. intel has wounded me deeply.
the fix for me seems to be capping my i9-14900K P-core turbo ratios to 56x in BIOS.
on my Gigabyte board I went:
BIOS → Tweaker → Advanced CPU Settings → Active Turbo Ratios → Manual
then I changed all P-core turbo ratios to 56.
after that I switched back to DX11 with:
-dx11 -novid -nojoy
and played 3 normal 6v6 games with no crash. before this, Deadlock would usually crash around the 7-10 min mark.
so if you have a 13900K / 14900K and Deadlock keeps crashing even after drivers/windows/overlays/etc, check your Intel default BIOS settings and maybe try the 56x P-core cap.
not calling it 100% fixed forever yet, but this is the first thing that actually made a real diffrence for me.
thanks to Deadlock, i have discovered that the issue might have been my CPU all along. god bless and fuck intel.