Why does the dxgi_error_device_hung crash happen during firefights?

[Patrick.S]

I keep getting a DirectX error that says "DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG" right when I'm in the middle of a firefight. My screen freezes and then the game just closes to desktop. I’ve updated my graphics drivers already, but it hasn’t made a difference. Has anyone else had this specific crash and figured out what might be causing it?

[George11]

Yep I’ve seen that exact freeze during a firefight. The screen just locks up and the game dumps to Desktop. I hadn’t touched anything in the drivers recently, but I did drop the in game quality a notch and killed overlay apps like Discord and GeForce Experience. It helped a bit, but it still came back now and then.

[Nora3]

DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG pops up when the GPU can’t keep up or times out. After chasing crash dumps I found it often cries out for a driver or hardware hiccup. I turned off hardware accelerated scheduling in Windows, disabled fullscreen optimizations for the game, and checked for overlays. Verified game files and did a clean boot. It got steadier for a few days but not a permanent fix.

[MarkP]

I had a similar crash and swapping the PSU fixed it for a while. Temps were fine, but the card would wince under heavy renders and reboot. After replacing the power supply, the crashes dropped noticeably. Still not perfect, but it bought me time to test other fixes.

[Logan_C]

Could this be something else deeper like RAM timing or a stray USB device pulling too much power during bursts? It’s hard to pin, because some days it only happens in one map while others it sits quietly. Has anyone confirmed a single root cause or is it just a random hang?