Playing with Path Tracing without DLSS causes my PC to eventually reset

[yabab]

Hey, folks! Ran into an interesting issue that I'm having a hard time pinning down and I'd like to share it with you to check if it happens with anyone else.

First, my specs:

i9 10900K
32Gb RAM
RTX 3080 Ti 12Gb
2TB XPG NVMe SSD

I have a 4K TV and was playing the game with Path Tracing, targeting 30 FPS at 1440p using DLSS Quality and the game ran fine for a few hours.

Unfortunately, I ran into some trouble with my Bluetooth headphones, so playing on my TV was out of the question due to its placement.

As a result, I started playing on a smaller 1080p display I have available. AFAIK, 1440p using DLSS Quality is 1080p internally. So I decided to cut the middleman and try playing with Path Tracing without the Deep Learning Super Sampling.

The performance is similar to my previous configuration and I'm happy with it. Except the game causes my rig to suddenly restart every once in a while. This usually happens during scene changes, either right after a loading screen or during a transition with no loading - like the Braindances in 'The Information'.

Might be unrelated, might not be: I also noticed that the performance without DLSS takes a moment to 'warm up'. If I run the benchmark with my DLSS set up, the game runs at a solid 30 FPS instantly. If I run the benchmark without DLSS, the first run will start at 20 FPS and slowly improve towards 30 FPS. If I run the benchmark again without DLSS, then the performance is instantly stable at 30 FPS.

I already have a ticket open about this, #15721; but wanted to collect some impressions from the community anyway. I'm currently playing with DLSS on at 1080p simply because I can avoid the resets if it's enabled.

Has anyone tried to play with Path Tracing without DLSS?

 

[tavellone]

The middleman was stopping your GPU from frying. Probably it keeps getting too hot and your computer turns off to stop your GPU from being irreparably damaged.

 

[yabab]

The middleman was stopping your GPU from frying. Probably it keeps getting too hot and your computer turns off to stop your GPU from being irreparably damaged.

I thought of that, so I ran the game in my 1080p display and had HWMonitor running in my 4K TV to monitor temps. CPU never went past 83°C and my GPU was reaching 102°C only in the Hot Spot - rest of the GPU was peaking at 84°C, even then the system wasn't rebooting.

It only reboots when a scene transition occurs...

 

[Nexxus88]

102???? I dont keep watch of hot spot temps on GPU admittedly but I've never heard of a GPU running at those temps and everything being a-ok.

 

[yabab]

102???? I dont keep watch of hot spot temps on GPU admittedly but I've never heard of a GPU running at those temps and everything being a-ok.

For the hotspot, that's not unheard of. Like I said, the other parts were peaking at 84°C.

Well, I'm running more tests today before I actually commit to a playthrough and it indeed seems like DLSS is the only way to use Path Tracing for me.

I went back to playing on my 4K TV and bumped up the resolution to 1440p again and turn DLSS on at Quality and using Ray Reconstruction.

Stressed both the rig and the game by continuously killing civilians, fighting the cops, getting into car chases and then dying and reloading to repeat it all over again for an hour: no sudden resets.

Went back to the scene of the last sudden reset (drone chase at the end of act 1) and could die and reload repeatedly with no sudden resets.

Curious thing is: at 1440p DLSS Quality, I'm actually asking the PC to do more processing than if it were simply rendering at 1080p.

At 1440p the game needs to rende natively at 1080p using Path Tracing and then upscale that image to 1440p in an additional step before showing me the frame. At 1080p, the upscaling should be entirely bypassed.

If anything, 1440p should be bringing my rig to a sudden reset due to overheating. Not 1080p natively.

I'm starting to consider it could be a problem with the old denoising solution. Since I only use DLSS with Ray Reconstruction, the new denoising might be bypassing the problem entirely while the old denoiser eventually causes the reset.