Game crashing and restarting PC.

[Valhalla]

Game keeps randomly crashing and completely restarts my PC.

Anyone else have this issue, and know how to fix it?

[Ricback2]

That's a temperature issue. Let me guess, AMD CPU with default cooler?

[Valhalla]

No, running a 3080 with a AIO liquid cooling that has a fan curve set up to go full extreme/max when I am gaming.

My sensors showed my CPU didn't even get above 60, and my GPU was about 55. Neither above temps that would be a heating issue.

[Zebedee]

To fully turn your PC off without you doing anything sounds like hardware, sadly. As you say you've ruled out temps, when this has happened to me in the past it's been a sign that the PSU is starting to fail and tends to start with just the one game (CPU heavy, perhaps). A quick way to check is to swap in a new one, if you've a spare. Good luck tracking down the cause in any case.

[Alive!]

This game having performance issues and crashing is a common complaint, but I haven't heard anyone complain about it crashing to the point that their PC automatically resets itself. For me, this game has crashed to where it's frozen my screen, which then forces me to manually reset my rig myself, which is pretty close to what you're describing. That's happened to me many times. I've beaten this game multiple times now, and I figured after playthrough #1 that the stuttering would stop after the game assets cached themselves to my system, but I still get stuttering (though not as much as playthrough #1) and I still get game crashes that happen quite frequently. The entire community is complaining about this right now. If you were wondering if this is a you issue, rest assured that it is not.

[Illusion of Progress]

If it's restarting as opposed to shutting down (and there's a difference as each tend to have different causes), it's typically the CPU identifying some sort of uncorrectable hardware issue (machine check exception) from which it cannot recover, and the way it deals with this is by signaling to the motherboard to restart.

Games put a lot of load on CPUs and GPUs so it might be exposing an instability in your system.

The first things to do in this situation are as follows.

1. Set everything to stock. BIOS to stock, RAM speed to default/JEDEC (no profile speeds), GPU back to stock if it's overclocked. You need to rule out that it isn't unstable due to custom settings and see if it's at least stable at stock.

2. Test various components. Run MemTest86 to check RAM, prime95 can be used to test CPU/RAM subsystem, and OCCT has a suite of tests. Monitor temperatures as well (overheating, at least with the CPU, will usually result in a shutdown as opposed to a restart).

Specifically, if the display goes Black and the GPU fans ramp up to full while this occurs, it might indicate the issue is with the video card or its drivers. This is sort of a GPU "panic mode". Overheating can sometimes cause it.

3. Check if Windows was making logs of these errors in the WHEA directors.

Windows/LiveKernelReports/WHEA
Windows/LiveKernelReports/WATCHDOG

If there's dump files present and they correspond to the time of the restart, you can look them over for clues. WinDbg can open these files.

[Valhalla]

I appreciate your responses everyone. I played for a bit more last night after making some changes, and didn't seem to have the problem anymore.

A file kept failing to acquire, and I could not seem to locate the .exe of the game anywhere in my Windows Explorer, which was very weird. It was also resetting ALL my settings every time it did this crash and restart, and acting as though it was the first time I was launching the game, as though it couldn't seem to recall the game had been opened prior to its crashes. I assume it was become it was crashing the entire system, so the files were not being properly saved.

Afterwards, I uninstalled the game, did a complete wipe of all associated files, and did a system recovery to a few days ago before I had a Windows update, then reinstalled.

I have not had an issue since, but I have also not thoroughly tested it yet. But as of now, the changes seem to have resorted all issues, minus one. I still am unable to discover where the .exe for the game is located, despite using Steam to locate it directly. I have been trying to locate it in order to make some changes that many users are finding as fixed to the constant crashing/stuttering of the game. However, without being able to find this, I cannot change them.

But, if all goes well, I will not have to. The purpose of this post was to identify if crashing and restarting was a common issue, which crashing seems common, but restarting was definitely not. This, as you said, seemed to be a "me" issue, which it likely was, but seemed to be on the software/OS side of things rather than hardware, at least at this time of testing.

Thank you all for your replies and suggestions. They helped guide me towards some anomalies in my system and may have helped fix the issue. Thank you again!