Steam Overlay causes entire PC to freeze and black screen when used while gaming

[Chai]

New update as of October 14th

Nvidia employee explained[www.nvidia.com], the final solution is multi-faceted and will include three fixes:

1. NVIDIA's next Game Ready Driver, will include a fix for an edge case where an application may crash when switching into RealTime threaded priority. As of now, Game Ready & Studio Driver 581.57 includes fix for "Steam overlay may cause game stability issues [5521892]"

2. Valve will also be moving the overlay software down in priority in a future Steam update.

3. NVIDIA will be assisting in the Quality of Service (QoS) for the Steam overlay in their next driver branch.

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New update as of August 18th

Nvidia employees received the necessary dump files. They stated that, in their words: "It appears this is caused from the Steam Webhelper running in realtime thread priority."

It's my understanding that they are currently working on identifying the specific causes and will be looking to resolve it. In the meantime, they have advised using a workaround by either disabling the Steam overlay or disabling hardware acceleration in Steam.

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Workaround provided by Valve

Launch Steam with the -disable-overlay-gpu-pri option. If you do not know how to launch Steam with options, then visit this guide

UPD: this workaround works not for everyone, so it is better to disable GPU acceleration for steam web views

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As the title of the topic suggests, this is a critical issue that appeared less than a week ago. I initially noticed this while playing CS2, I always look through my teammates' profiles when preparing for a match, and during this I got a complete system freeze, no any key combination worked and even the mouse cursor froze, after which the entire image disappeared and the screen turned black without the possibility of recovery, but at the same time I can hear all the sounds. And only rebooting via the button on the PC case helps.

I created a topic on the CS2 forum where I received answers from several people with different hardware about the same issue: https://steamcommunity.com/app/730/discussions/0/594023708174121698/


What I have managed to understand during this time:

1. This does not happen always. For example it may not happen during the preparation for the match, but if you use the overlay during the game, you can still encounter a complete freeze of the computer and a subsequent black screen

2. The Discord overlay for some reason can save from this, I was not able to reproduce this with the Discord overlay enabled (most likely the Nvidia overlay can also "fix" this)

3. Probably this is not related to the Nvidia drivers, because I am not using the latest driver version (576.02), and I did not update the drivers before this started. And also people with a different driver version wrote about same issue.

4. According to the answer of a person from the forum, this happens not only with CS2, but also with other games

5. After rebooting the computer, I see a lot of "nvlddmkm" errors in the Event Log, which directly indicate the loss of image and a driver failure

6. This is due to Steam update and possibly some conflict with Windows 11 24H2

Initially, I did not understand that this issue was widespread and tried to exclude the problem with my computer: all my games work fine, the temperatures of the GPU/CPU are good, tests in OCCT also passed without any errors, and I was also able to easily reproduce this on another computer in the same game (CS2).

I just hope this issue will be noticed and fixed as soon as possible, because it seems to me that this is a rather critical bug.

Update

For those who installed the update KB5058499 for Windows 11 24H2, please let me know if this issue is fixed after the update

Several people confirmed that the KB5058499 update did not solve this issue, also using Windows 10 instead of Windows 11 24H2 also does not solve it. Therefore, this is the fault of the Steam Client, Valve needs to notice all of us.

Update 2:

I received a new response from Steam support, where they told me that they forwarded my report to the developers and that we all should follow the updates. However, for some reason they will reproduce this issue in CS2, probably because I said that I initially noticed this issue in this game, I don't know but ok.

Brief info for those who are new here so that people don't have to reread a lot of pages

It is the Steam Overlay that crashes the driver, which is why the screen freezes and then there is a black screen without losing the monitor signal, this is what "nvlddmkm" errors means in this case.
If it was the driver's fault, people with a driver that came out in 2022 wouldn't write that they have the same issue. If it was on the Windows side, people wouldn't be writing that they have Windows 10 and the same issue started happening at the same time as users of the latest Windows 11 24H2 (And I want to remind that Windows 10 hasn't received any updates other than security updates for a long time). Therefore, this is the fault of the Steam client update for May 20 (or most likely the previous update before May 20).

[Wolfie von Carendot]

As a reminder to people: Still comment on this thread to show Valve this is still an issue, but there is a guaranteed fix by disabling hardware acceleration in the settings.

Do this and you won't have to worry. Yes, your Steam might be a LITTLE more laggy, but it's that or risking your PC killing itself if you dare to open up a web browser tab with the overlay, and I think most people should be able to know which is better.

[fctory.pro]

same problem....

[MEEP]

Same problem here whhat the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥ is this ♥♥♥♥

[An Unoriginal Name]

if you are still having this problem, please read and follow the instructions posted by an nvidia employee[www.nvidia.com] to submit crash dump files related to the issue to nvidia for investigation. this issue will not progress until someone has done this and nvidia confirms it.

[Dom]

This is a bizarre problem and has been going on for months now.

What's even worse is that it leads thousands of people to think that something is seriously wrong with their hardware when reinstalling the operating system and changing driver versions don't fix it.

Something in Steam Overlay causes GPU hang, Windows TDR (timeout detection and recovery) feature kicks in, kills the drivers and attempts to recover (restart) them but fails. In a normal situation the drivers would be recovered after couple of seconds with TDR but something in the overlay hangs the GPU to the point where even recovery won't work.

And you can try to recover (restart) your drivers using Win+Ctrl+Shift+B. If you do this in desktop it should work, demonstrating that the recovery function is fully functional and not the problem here.

It's a shame that there's been no fix yet and all people can do is put a band-aid on it and hope for the best.

Windows 11 August updates (will roll out today) will include stability fixes for graphics, including some cases where computers become unresponsive. Highly advised that people install those because anything that can make the computer more stable is more than welcome at this point.

Valve needs to investigate this as much as they just can, since it looks like it's happening exclusively with Steam Overlay. Everything else works fine.

[An Unoriginal Name]

Originally posted by Dom:

Valve needs to investigate this as much as they just can, since it looks like it's happening exclusively with Steam Overlay. Everything else works fine.

we already have insight and guidance from valve on the issue:

Originally posted by mikela:

Hi, this nVidia driver issue may be triggered by a workaround that runs in the Steam client while the overlay is active that increases the graphics priority of the overlay renderer. This is required in some configurations where the Windows Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling setting is enabled.

Please try launching Steam with the -disable-overlay-gpu-pri option and see if this still occurs.

If that seems to resolve it for most of you we'll try to work with nVidia to get their driver fixed, as this is ultimately a driver bug.

Originally posted by jmccaskey:

Originally posted by Jerek:

If this does work, can I just leave it there or is there a new feature that needs it? I dont really have a need or trust in nvidia to update my current drivers

You can leave it, but if you have hardware accelerated graphics scheduling on in Windows, then it will make the overlay much less responsive. The command line param disables us telling windows when we want to have higher priority even though our window is technically in the background because of how the overlay is rendered offscreen in Chromium then composited in game process. So if you see terrible general overlay responsiveness, the command line param will be why. But might be better than hanging.

Mostly, let us know, so we can complain to nVidia about it being a problem. Lots of other things make the GPU scheduling calls now that MS has moved to the hardware GPU scheduling, so a hang when the call is made is a serious driver bug.

if you can reproduce the issue, submit the crash dump files to nvidia[www.nvidia.com] by reading and following the instructions their employee (Manuel@NVIDIA) provided in the thread created for this issue.

[Dom]

Originally posted by An Unoriginal Name:

Originally posted by Dom:

Valve needs to investigate this as much as they just can, since it looks like it's happening exclusively with Steam Overlay. Everything else works fine.

we already have insight and guidance from valve on the issue:

Originally posted by mikela:

Hi, this nVidia driver issue may be triggered by a workaround that runs in the Steam client while the overlay is active that increases the graphics priority of the overlay renderer. This is required in some configurations where the Windows Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling setting is enabled.

Please try launching Steam with the -disable-overlay-gpu-pri option and see if this still occurs.

If that seems to resolve it for most of you we'll try to work with nVidia to get their driver fixed, as this is ultimately a driver bug.

Originally posted by jmccaskey:

You can leave it, but if you have hardware accelerated graphics scheduling on in Windows, then it will make the overlay much less responsive. The command line param disables us telling windows when we want to have higher priority even though our window is technically in the background because of how the overlay is rendered offscreen in Chromium then composited in game process. So if you see terrible general overlay responsiveness, the command line param will be why. But might be better than hanging.

Mostly, let us know, so we can complain to nVidia about it being a problem. Lots of other things make the GPU scheduling calls now that MS has moved to the hardware GPU scheduling, so a hang when the call is made is a serious driver bug.

if you can reproduce the issue, submit the crash dump files to nvidia[www.nvidia.com] by reading and following the instructions their employee (Manuel@NVIDIA) provided in the thread created for this issue.

Yes but that's just a band-aid, it's not a fix. The problem is that the default settings of Steam are crashing thousands of GPUs, which again leads people to think that their hardware is failing. This should not be happening in the first place with the default settings.

I'm pretty sure there are people who have submitted crash dumps already, I certainly have plenty of those on my PC. I don't really want to spam the inbox if someone has already submitted these.

[An Unoriginal Name]

Originally posted by Dom:

Yes but that's just a band-aid, it's not a fix. The problem is that the default settings of Steam are crashing thousands of GPUs, which again leads people to think that their hardware is failing. This should not be happening in the first place with the default settings.

I'm pretty sure there are people who have submitted crash dumps already, I certainly have plenty of those on my PC. I don't really want to spam the inbox if someone has already submitted these.

the issue has already been mitigated by valve to the extent that i can't even reproduce it on my own machine anymore using default settings.

unfortunately, i too didn't think to bother providing any dumps to nvidia since valve initially said part of the resolution would be from them contacting nvidia. we have no evidence they ever received a response from nvidia, and they have bigger fish to fry than this issue, so they suggested we contact them ourselves. this is where we are at with this issue now. if nvidia didn't want people to send anything to them they just wouldn't have made a post requesting that information, i think.

[An Unoriginal Name]

nvidia driver version 580.97 has just released with no acknowledgement or indication of this issue from nvidia.

[Dom]

Originally posted by An Unoriginal Name:

Originally posted by Dom:

Yes but that's just a band-aid, it's not a fix. The problem is that the default settings of Steam are crashing thousands of GPUs, which again leads people to think that their hardware is failing. This should not be happening in the first place with the default settings.

I'm pretty sure there are people who have submitted crash dumps already, I certainly have plenty of those on my PC. I don't really want to spam the inbox if someone has already submitted these.

the issue has already been mitigated by valve to the extent that i can't even reproduce it on my own machine anymore using default settings.

unfortunately, i too didn't think to bother providing any dumps to nvidia since valve initially said part of the resolution would be from them contacting nvidia. we have no evidence they ever received a response from nvidia, and they have bigger fish to fry than this issue, so they suggested we contact them ourselves. this is where we are at with this issue now. if nvidia didn't want people to send anything to them they just wouldn't have made a post requesting that information, i think.

Mitigating the issue of course isn't the same thing as fixing it. I can confirm that it is still happening, although maybe not as often as it used to. It's very unfortunate that we still don't know what actually causes this, and what procedures have been taken to address the issue, and it's been going on for months. The lack of transparency is disappointing.

It's literally a critical bug that is system (session) breaking. If you have anything important open on your computer that is stored in RAM, it literally leads to data loss. By any credible software development standards, this should be at the top of the list when it comes to problems to fix/address. The potential of data loss is one of the biggest determining factors in software development when deciding which issues and bugs are high-priority.

Therefore it is shameful that it's been going on this long.

I'm not convinced that enough attention has been drawn to this issue so far, given the severity of it. But maybe I'm wrong, I'm just basing this on what I can see and the problem persisting for months.

[Euphytose]

Originally posted by Dom:

Originally posted by An Unoriginal Name:

the issue has already been mitigated by valve to the extent that i can't even reproduce it on my own machine anymore using default settings.

unfortunately, i too didn't think to bother providing any dumps to nvidia since valve initially said part of the resolution would be from them contacting nvidia. we have no evidence they ever received a response from nvidia, and they have bigger fish to fry than this issue, so they suggested we contact them ourselves. this is where we are at with this issue now. if nvidia didn't want people to send anything to them they just wouldn't have made a post requesting that information, i think.

Mitigating the issue of course isn't the same thing as fixing it. I can confirm that it is still happening, although maybe not as often as it used to. It's very unfortunate that we still don't know what actually causes this, and what procedures have been taken to address the issue, and it's been going on for months. The lack of transparency is disappointing.

It's literally a critical bug that is system (session) breaking. If you have anything important open on your computer that is stored in RAM, it literally leads to data loss. By any credible software development standards, this should be at the top of the list when it comes to problems to fix/address. The potential of data loss is one of the biggest determining factors in software development when deciding which issues and bugs are high-priority.

Therefore it is shameful that it's been going on this long.

Disabling hardware accel 100% fixed the issue for me, it never happened again.

For sure it sucks to have a slightly slower overlay, but I'll take that over hard rebooting the PC.

And you can bet your butt that I'm not going to re-enable hardware accel anytime soon.

[Dom]

Originally posted by Euphytose:

Originally posted by Dom:

Mitigating the issue of course isn't the same thing as fixing it. I can confirm that it is still happening, although maybe not as often as it used to. It's very unfortunate that we still don't know what actually causes this, and what procedures have been taken to address the issue, and it's been going on for months. The lack of transparency is disappointing.

It's literally a critical bug that is system (session) breaking. If you have anything important open on your computer that is stored in RAM, it literally leads to data loss. By any credible software development standards, this should be at the top of the list when it comes to problems to fix/address. The potential of data loss is one of the biggest determining factors in software development when deciding which issues and bugs are high-priority.

Therefore it is shameful that it's been going on this long.

Disabling hardware accel 100% fixed the issue for me, it never happened again.

For sure it sucks to have a slightly slower overlay, but I'll take that over hard rebooting the PC.

And you can bet your butt that I'm not going to re-enable hardware accel anytime soon.

That's good to hear - however, that doesn't help thousands of people that have potentially RMA'd their GPUs already because they thought that something was wrong with their hardware or lost important session data because of the crashes.

It's still an extremely critical bug, even if there are band-aid fixes.

[An Unoriginal Name]

Originally posted by Dom:

Mitigating the issue of course isn't the same thing as fixing it. I can confirm that it is still happening, although maybe not as often as it used to. It's very unfortunate that we still don't know what actually causes this, and what procedures have been taken to address the issue, and it's been going on for months. The lack of transparency is disappointing.

i'm not really sure what transparency you are looking for other than a valve developer popping in to say they are still aware of the issue and have no further information to provide at this time. they've already adjusted the client to reduce the frequency of the issue, but clearly the issue does not originate from the steam client or it would affect a much broader audience. in case you missed it, there are very specific circumstances necessary to trigger the issue presented in this thread.

[Dom]

Originally posted by An Unoriginal Name:

i'm not really sure what transparency you are looking for other than a valve developer popping in to say they are still aware of the issue and have no further information to provide at this time. they've already adjusted the client to reduce the frequency of the issue, but clearly the issue does not originate from the steam client or it would affect a much broader audience. in case you missed it, there are very specific circumstances necessary to trigger the issue presented in this thread.

Considering that it apparently started happening after May update for Steam client, Steam client may not be the inherent cause of the problem but some change within the Steam client made the problem appear. However there is no specific information what was changed. And people have been provided band-aid workarounds. But we don't know if any permanent fix is on the way at all. There could be more transparency on that.

Steam Overlay is not a "very specific circumstance", it is a core feature of Steam client.

[An Unoriginal Name]

Originally posted by Dom:

Considering that it apparently started happening after May update for Steam client, Steam client may not be the inherent cause of the problem but some change within the Steam client made the problem appear. However there is no specific information what was changed. And people have been provided band-aid fixes. But we don't know if any permanent fix is on the way at all.

Steam Overlay is not a "very specific circumstance", it is a core feature of Steam client.

please attempt to read the valve developer posts that i have quoted previously.