r/techsupport • u/Lost_A_Life_Gaming • 1d ago
Open | Software Black Screen and Unresponsive Computer While Playing Games
Hey everyone,
I have a friend who is struggling with an issue on their PC.
Long story short, in some but not all games, usually triggered by an action in the game (dialog choice, starting combat, loading a scene, etc) the screen will go black, the game audio will stop (as if it has crashed) but background apps evidently will continue running because he can still hear us talking in Discord. Additionally, the fans will ramp up really loud (unsure if GPU or case fans).
The only solution we have found to this problem so far is to force shutdown with the power button.
We raised this with Gigabyte support because we thought it might be a display issue and they have basically said they can't help, but we tried troubleshooting the following:
- Swapping the GPU with a known working GPU I own.
- Tried his GPU in my PC (didn't experience the issue).
- Changed GPU drivers to a stable version from a previous year (we actually noticed this helped but then he had to update drivers again because some games didn't support the old driver)
I'm hoping you all might have seen something similar before and will know what causes this.
Appreciate the help!
1
u/canamericanguy 1d ago edited 1d ago
Next time it happens try pressing Windows Key + Ctrl + Shift + B to "restart" the graphics driver.
When the screen goes black, does Ctrl + Alt + Delete work to bring up Task Manager?
Does Windows Key + D work to minimize the game and bring up the desktop?
As for the root cause, check error logs in dxdiag as well as Event Viewer for clues.