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




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.


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).
Last edited by quemosquitoqueteniaspapi; 30 Jul @ 8:30pm
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Showing 1-1 of 1 comments
_I_ 30 Jul @ 8:27pm 
most likely gpu or mobo chipset drivers

get the correct drivers from mobo mfg site
chipset, audio, lan, wifi, bt

in steam library, each game properties, just disable the overlay

or to disable all game overlays
steam -> settings -> ingame -> untick enable steam overlay
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