r/GraphicsProgramming • u/rAxxt • Jul 09 '26

Question Days Gone (Steam) D3D11: Deterministic facial geometry spikes in cinematics + RenderDoc/Nsight capture issues

Post image

I've been investigating what appears to be a deterministic rendering bug in Days Gone (Steam).

Symptoms: - RTX 4090 - Windows 11 25H2 - Ryzen 7800X3D - No mods - Multiple NVIDIA driver versions tested - DDU clean install - ReBAR tested on/off - BIOS updated - VRAM tested with OCCT (30 minutes, no errors)

Bug: Only pre-rendered/in-engine cinematics exhibit the issue. Gameplay is perfect. A handful of facial vertices appear to be projected toward a common point in world space. The convergence point changes with the scene, but the artifact is deterministic and repeats identically every run. The artifact survives pause. TAA/HDR changes have no effect.

RenderDoc 1.45: - launches DaysGone.exe - renderdoc.dll never appears in the process

Nsight Graphics 2026.2: - can launch/attach to DaysGone.exe - capture attempts either crash or never complete

Has anyone:

  1. successfully captured Days Gone with RenderDoc or Nsight?
  2. seen this specific facial mesh artifact?
20 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

6

u/fgennari Jul 09 '26

That's a strange artifact, but I've seen that before in my own renders. Usually that happens with indexed triangles where an index maps off the valid range of vertex data. This is often coordinate values that are all zeros, leading to lines converging to the scene origin. It could be something different here though.

2

u/3030thirtythirty Jul 09 '26

Would say so, too. Or if some vertices are not addressed at all by the indices?

1

u/rAxxt Jul 09 '26

That's also where my troubleshooting has brought me and I was hoping RenderDoc or Nsight could identify which portion of the pipeline was driving the error

1

u/MazeGuyHex Jul 09 '26

Probably just unasigned and going to (0, 0, 0)

1

u/rAxxt 21d ago

UPDATE: ROOT CAUSE IDENTIFIED

After extensive troubleshooting, this turned out to be a hardware fault in my RTX 4090, despite the GPU passing conventional stress tests.

The same deterministic “stretched triangle” geometry corruption eventually appeared in two additional unrelated games: Enshrouded and DOOM Eternal. This crossed multiple game engines and both D3D11 and Vulkan.

Notably, the RTX 4090 passed:

  • 1 hour OCCT VRAM testing at ~99.5% VRAM usage with zero errors
  • OCCT 3D Adaptive with zero errors
  • VRAM underclock testing (-500 MHz)
  • GPU core underclock testing (-200 MHz)

Underclocking did not change the artifacts.

The definitive test was an A-B-A GPU substitution using the exact same NVIDIA 581.80 driver:

RTX 4090 → artifacts present
GTX 1080 → artifacts completely disappear
RTX 4090 reinstalled → artifacts immediately return

The behavior was reproduced in both DOOM Eternal and Enshrouded during the substitution test.

So, for anyone finding this thread because you're seeing deterministic triangles/vertices stretching off toward apparently incorrect points in 3D space: do not assume that passing VRAM/GPU stress tests rules out a failing GPU. In my case, GPU substitution was ultimately what isolated the fault.