Thursday, March 28th 2024
PGL Investigating GeForce RTX 4080 GPU Driver Crash, Following Esports Event Disruption
The Professional Gamers League (PGL) showcased its newly upgraded tournament rig specification prior to the kick-off of their (still ongoing) CS2 Major Copenhagen 2024 esports event. As reported, over a week ago, competitors have been treated to modern systems decked out with AMD's popular gaming-oriented Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 graphics cards, while BenQ's ZOWIE XL2566K 24.5" 360 Hz gaming monitor delivers a superfast visual feed. A hefty chunk of change has been spent on new hardware, but expensive cutting-edge tech can falter. Virtus.pro team member—Jame—experienced a major software crash during a match against rival group, G2.
PCGamesN noted that this frustrating incident ended the affected team's chance to grab a substantial cash reward. Their report put a spotlight on this unfortunate moment: "in the second round of a best of three, Virtus Pro were a few rounds away from qualifying for the playoffs, only for their aspirations to be squashed through no fault of their own...Jame experiences a graphics card driver crash that irrecoverably steers the round in G2's favor, culminating in Virtus Pro losing the match 11-13. Virtus Pro would then go on to lose the subsequent tie-break match as the round was not replayed. In effect, the graphics card driver crash partly cost the team their chance at winning an eventual $1.25 million prize pool." PGL revealed, via a social media post, that officials are doing some detective work: "we wish to clarify the situation involving Jame during the second map, Inferno, in the series against G2. A technical malfunction occurred due to an NVIDIA driver crash, resulting in a game crash. We are continuing our investigation into the matter." The new tournament rigs were "meticulously optimized" and tested in the weeks leading up to CS2 Major Copenhagen 2024—it is believed that the driver crash was a random anomaly. PGL and NVIDIA are currently working on a way to "identify and fix the issue."
HLTVorg conducted a post-match interview with Jame (Virtus Pro):
Sources:
PCGamesN, Wccftech, PGL Tweet
PCGamesN noted that this frustrating incident ended the affected team's chance to grab a substantial cash reward. Their report put a spotlight on this unfortunate moment: "in the second round of a best of three, Virtus Pro were a few rounds away from qualifying for the playoffs, only for their aspirations to be squashed through no fault of their own...Jame experiences a graphics card driver crash that irrecoverably steers the round in G2's favor, culminating in Virtus Pro losing the match 11-13. Virtus Pro would then go on to lose the subsequent tie-break match as the round was not replayed. In effect, the graphics card driver crash partly cost the team their chance at winning an eventual $1.25 million prize pool." PGL revealed, via a social media post, that officials are doing some detective work: "we wish to clarify the situation involving Jame during the second map, Inferno, in the series against G2. A technical malfunction occurred due to an NVIDIA driver crash, resulting in a game crash. We are continuing our investigation into the matter." The new tournament rigs were "meticulously optimized" and tested in the weeks leading up to CS2 Major Copenhagen 2024—it is believed that the driver crash was a random anomaly. PGL and NVIDIA are currently working on a way to "identify and fix the issue."
39 Comments on PGL Investigating GeForce RTX 4080 GPU Driver Crash, Following Esports Event Disruption
Found the problem.
Also odd they went with 7800X3D for a counter strike tournament when the Intel counterparts are about 10% faster for that specific game.
Then again we're talking 750 FPS vs 650 so it's not super important.
This is on a clean windows 11 install, windows management engine updated. latest bios. stock bios settings. and nvidia driver is not to blame for my issue.
For example I have a faulty 5800X, bought in 2022.
It has 2 faulty cores, that throw an error if perform a CoreCycler test.
I had manualy to set +5 CurveOptimizer (on these 2 cores) to fix these cores. (it did not effect on performance)
Nothing is perfect, the choice is all about statistics, you choose the most stable configuration and software combination and hope it goes all well...people who believe otherwise never owned a computer or worked in IT.
Few months ago AMD drivers used to ban people from those very games, because of a DLL injection for the anti-lag+ feature. Those drivers hold more lines of code than most other frameworks
It's the configuration of that single PC to blame.
The wild guess from is that it was a bit flip in the memory on Jame's 4080 that caused this crash to occur.
www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/noaa-satellites-detect-severe-solar-storm#:~:text=From%20March%2023%E2%80%9324%2C%202024,powerful%20X%2Dclass%20solar%20flare.
Edit: there is an inside joke to this as well, that God themself turned Jame's pc off, because they call him Jesus of CS.
(sarcasm)
So a PC crashed during a tournament, this happens all the time…Depends on whether the problem is reproducible or not. If it is, and only on this particular PC, then it's a hardware issue. The organizers must be professional enough to have an image for the software setup for all the tournament PCs, so configuration issues should be eliminated. And they probably have spares if one fails.
If the hardware is not at fault, then it could be either the driver or a bug in the OS.
Either way, if this is an obscure and hard to reproduce bug, then I doubt the dumps from the BSOD is going to result in something useful.
Too funny, PCs being PCs.
Am I the only one who thinks the teams should bring their own PCs that have to meet regulations? Kind of like Formula 1. That way, a hardware/driver failure is on their own team and it's choices.
Honestly I'm somewhat surprised that there isn't a Valve issued spec for tournament PC's running a stripped out version of SteamOS in Gamescope.