Dying in warthunder causes huge GPU loads, which can result in the GPU crashing

Community Technical Support Crashes, Connection, Update Problems & Advice
1

Dying in warthunder can cause graphics cards to crash

This is something that happens especially often with high end NVIDIA Graphics Cards using the 12V High Power Connector.

This is not the graphics driver crashing, but the graphics card itself.

Symptoms

This will result in a black screen and the fans going to 100%.

Other applications like Discord or Spotify will still be running fine (audible).

Retsarting the graphics driver (ctrl + shift + win + b) won’t fix the problem.

Only a restart of the system will fix this issue.

Source of the Problem

For some reason, dying causes the GPU to be subject to an immediate huge load, which causes high transient spikes in the Voltage.

While this is something which should be addressed by the Manufacturers like NVIDIA and PSU manufacturers, there is also the problem on the side of Warthunder. The huge loads on the GPU, when one dies.

I believe that the huge stress on the GPU when one dies is a bug and not an intended feature.

Since more and more cards will use the 12V HPWR connector, I believe that the issue within Warthunder itself should be addressed.

Workarounds

Here are some workarounds that might help in reducing said crashes or completely eliminating them.

Hardware Side
  • Alternate 12VHPWR connector
  • Alternate Power Supply Unit (PSU)
Software Side
  • Limiting the FPS of the game via the graphics driver
Warthunder Side
  • Reducing the texture quality
  • Reducing the mesh Quality
  • Switching away from DX12

I hope that this might help some people out there and that this bug might be addressed…

4 Likes
2

how are people using newer GPUs than my 3060 but somehow doing worse?
this game is a ram eater but its never too bad on GPU

you got an old CPU or something?

image

3

Nah, my specs are completely fine.

i7 13700KF and 32GB of DDR5 RAM.

Ressource Usage is always completely fine with a lot of free capacity.

The Game itself is not really that bad on GPU, unless you use RayTracing.

The Problem is just with the sudden GPU load when one dies. Sadly I don’t know what exactly the cause of this spike is.

4

odd. are you sure your files arent just corrupted? verify your files is always a good thing to check

5

i also have this issue with my RTX 3060 Ti.

sometimes at random, sometimes interacting with menu’s or just getting a kill or getting in the cockpit view will do this to me.

nothing works except fully rebooting my pc.

6

Just as a random thing to note, ctrl-shift-win-b reloads the graphics driver if you want to try see if that avoids you needing to reboot.

1 Like
7

never works, as this load issue causes the entire graphics card to crash.
sound still works but the rest becomes unresponsive and the screens remains black and cannot be turned on.

8

Well I got a 3060 and I don’t have this happening.

(I was running DX12 last week but switched to dx11 to deal with the black loading screen pause)

1 Like
9

Hey I was having the exact same issue last year and earlier this year, and the issue turned out to be a hardware issue. The motherboard had gone bad both times (thankfully microcenter replaced it under warranty free of charge both times) and the 2nd time it started happening, they found out my PSU was bad and likely had killed both motherboards. So you might want to take your PC to a shop to get the hardware checked out.

10

i also use dx11. so idk.

1 Like
11

Another thing I actually also do with my settings is I use the nVidia app to ‘optimise’ them, and then knock it back a couple of notches to the point where it removes vsync and Ambient Occlusion.

12

Same issue here with RTX 5070
Happened to me 3 times in last 48 hours