AMD Constant Hard Crashing

[Modrain]

Ever since last patch update, Wallpaper Engine will randomly at times freeze my entire computer for all applications, I'll still get audio but all video will stop, and I'm unable to open task manager or click any open windows to close, it'll require a hard reboot. Sometimes I can go days or a week without issue, other times it's 3 crashes in the same day. I have it uninstalled now until next patch will hopefully fix these issues.

AMD Ryzen 7 1700
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070

[Biohazard]

I'm sorry you're having problems of this kind but Wallpaper Engine technically cannot crash your computer and no patch from our end has caused this, see here: https://help.wallpaperengine.io/en/crash/system.html

Since you have an Nvidia GPU, their drivers have been unstable since December and they only recently started fixing these problems with driver 461.51. So maybe that driver would solve your issue or the last known good driver 457.51 would.

[Modrain]

My Nvidia drivers are up to date, 461.40 release date 1/26/21, my system has only ever crashed/froze when Wallpaper Engine is installed and running. I know you have it documented it doesn't have anything working with Windows that could cause a crash but every time I've been running Wallpaper since December it's been giving issues. It may be the Nvidia drivers as you said but I always keep my drivers up to date so maybe it's something with the compatibility on Wallpaper Engine?

[Biohazard]

Nvidia started to release the broken drivers in December and your current version (461.40) is still part of the driver release that are causing severe issues.

Up to this day, Nvidia has not fixed all the new issues they introduced. Version 461.40 is not the latest version, you can get 461.51 from here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/432343/announcing-geforce-hotfix-driver-46151-released-25/ they fixed Wallpaper Engine crashing on start up there like you can see from the changelog. I don't know if your problem is fundamentally related to that or not, but otherwise you can download driver 457.51 which is the last known good version. If you don't need to have the latest driver for Cyberpunk 2077 then you can install 457.51 to fix your PC and wait until Nvidia improves their drivers again to get them to the same stability as before.

Originally posted by Modrain:

It may be the Nvidia drivers as you said but I always keep my drivers up to date so maybe it's something with the compatibility on Wallpaper Engine?

Like the guide explains, Wallpaper Engine uses hardware video decoding which games don't use and most video players don't and if you have multiple monitors then Wallpaper Engine can create multiple 3D windows for each wallpaper which isn't something any game does and most applications don't either.

Nvidia is responsible for providing a stable driver that supports everything Windows has to offer and they broke things related to multi-monitor support and video playback, which you can see when you glance over all the new issues people reported with these drivers on their driver forums. There is nothing we can change from our end, we are adhering to how graphics work in Windows and Nvidia has to ensure that their graphics drivers do the same, if they don't, Windows breaks.