Feedback Unity Games Becoming Unplayable & Undevelopable

Hello, this took a while to figure out so I apologize if this comes across as discombobulated. I believe for certain systems like myself Unity Editor and worse so Unity Games are throwing a DX11/12 error.

I use a GTX 980 on Windows 10 64-bit. I have it on SLi I believe 8 gigs of video memory and 32 gigs of Ram.

I have had a hell of a time developing in Unity since May with Unity crashing on me up to 9 times each hour with a Swap Chain error. I've tried many-many-many solutions with the most recent on being to keep Unity as a window.

What caught my attention though is that games that have been updated to Unity 2021 are also locking up my PC. For perspective, I can run any game not made in Unity perfectly fine, PSO 2 NGS, Cyberpunk, Warframe, you name it so long as it isn't using the Unity Engine I can leave it running indefinitely come back and things are still stable.

However if I play Bloons TD, Yugioh Master Duel or even simpler 2d games my PC will freeze up to the same tune of what the Unity Editor does.

Though games using earlier versions of Unity are stable.

Something was done in May that makes Unity games unplayable for my system at least and I've heard of others with this issue. Is there some kind of resolution to this?

Yes I've updated my drivers and so on. On NVIDIA the error is being described as a application specific issue. In one case it was an application OSD interfering with a system OSD sending the DX11/12 error.

I'm not sure if this is a good place to put this but it's gotten really bad now since I am assuming some of my favorite games are updating their Unity and thus becoming unplayable.

 

Nobody can help you regarding unity games here, thats down to the developer. What you are describing does not affect me and I have pretty much the exact same setup, so its not unity specific but something specific to your setup, such as not having a good driver version, not having the right frameworks installed etc.

Having up to date drivers is not always a good thing, the "latest" is not always the most "stable".

Either way, I suggest you contact the developers of the games, nobody here can help regarding this.

Regarding the swapchain error on editor, thats entirely unrelated to this (and as far as I know, something that is fixed if using the correct version and setup)- but I recommend posting in a relevant section for that as this is general discussion, not a support forum.

Good luck

 

I only listed some of the games where I get the freezing issue, as I said I have tried this across several games and found that it only happens with Unity games. These games at various times previously I had no issues with. It's been a slow trickle of them becoming unplayable as time progresses.

Maybe it's a coincidence, but my setup is mostly default and the throw away line I keep getting is update my driver so I have been doing that.

I am happy for you that you've got an identical setup to mine with no issues, I still have these issues and from what I gather around the web in looking for solutions to this for the past 5 months others are cropping up as well with similar issues.

Thanks for the advice and I'll look around for the support forum .

 

SLI: if I remember correctly the GTX 980 has at most 4GB of video memory. Having two of them still gives you only 4GB of video memory available for games because content loaded into video memory is stored on both cards.

Since SLI is a huge source of issues and more often than not underutilized (if at all) it would be worth a try uninstalling one of the cards for a couple days to see if that changes any of the issues. If it doesn‘t swap one card with the other for s few more days just in case you have a faulty/failing card.

The 980 came out 8 years ago and production ended 6 years ago and ever since four newer generations of GPUs were released. It is not unexpected that over time aging hardware starts mucking about in some way. If you owned that PC ever since, it could actually be something as trivial as dust collecting on fans making them spin slower or not at all causing overheating causing crashes or freezes. More so if you haven‘t reinstalled Windows ever since which also has a tendency to „collect dust“ so to speak.

Similary any transistor in any chip could have turned bad but only causes issues with certain code paths, meaning if unity uses such a code path (or sequence of GPU/CPU instructions) in their runtime it would cause unity apps to be prone to such issues. It needn‘t even be Unity‘s fault - could be a driver optimization too. It‘s not unusual for old video cards to start exhibiting stability or performance issues with the latest drivers because they are being optimized for the latest hardware above all else. It‘s worth trying out a five year old WHQ certified driver version in that instance.

 

Oh and be sure to run memtestx86 or similar overnight from a boot stick just to make sure you have perfectly working memory sticks.

 

Okay, this was helpful - I'll try your advice, thank you very much.

To be clear I wasn't blaming Unity, only asking if there is anything anyone knows that could cause Unity to act this way and how to solve it. I know the issue started in May and that the problem extended to Unity games I play later on.

At first I figured it was just one game so I did message the developer, then it started happening in 2, 3, and now almost all of the more recent games and old ones after they update. Searching around I saw that my questions were met with more and more people saying the same things were happening to them.

If it's just dust then that would be a relief.

 

I haven't done much research or bug filing yet so this is anecdotal but yeah, our windows 10 (GTX 1070) dev machine using Unity 2021.3.x has been hard crashing quite a bit this year with DX11 swapchain issues. I have not seen this issue with some older editors/projects we have on there using 2017.x, 2020.x. Sorry, I don't have any suggestions to help track down the issue yet.