Randomly, my entire pc freezes during matches; the only way to fix it is to restart my pc. This happens frequently enough that it starts to discourage me from playing.
What exactly happens when it does?
About three weeks ago I started having the odd incident, where sound would momentarily loop, then stop, and the screen would get frozen. But the mouse would move, until I press Alt-Tab. Overall three times. Curiously, music player kept playing. The third, last time, I just jumped on my laptop to finish the game. An hour later I noticed that Windows now allowed switching apps, and I could terminate Heroes. (Games generally don’t allow Win+D and similar shortcuts, and sometimes force focus, so it can appear
However, I had one similar crash in GT Legends, which suggests something more generic.
Everything in the machine is old, so I’m still suspecting some hardware error, or maybe malware hiccups. “Upgrade drivers” or somesuch makes no sense, unless someone hard coded crashes if date is 2022-12 or later.
Entire PC freezes or PC suddenly restarting are both signs of potentially unstable hardware or buggy drivers. If you have any overclocks applied, considering reverting them back to stock to see if that helps stop the crashes. If it does, you will need to find new stable values for your overclocks.
nothing is overclocked and this is the only game where I encounter this issue.
The audio continues to play but the entire PC freezes including the mouse. I can’t do anything on the PC so I have to force restart it. This only occurs in this game, I can play every other game fine. My hardware isn’t very old either.
The symptoms still sound very much like faulty hardware. Possibly an unreliable GPU.
From a programming perspective it is pretty much impossible to make a modern user level application, such as a game, crash or freeze a computer by accident. The operating system has safeties in place to prevent this and instead just crash the user level application. As such if your entire system is crashing playing a game like Heroes of the Storm, it is very likely that something is not working correctly with your system, be it unreliable components or buggy UEFI/drivers.
Why just Heroes of the Storm is crashing can be due to the type of workload. Each application produces a different workload which stresses hardware and drivers in different ways. Heroes of the Storm is based on the StarCraft II engine so can generate workloads similar to power stress tests such as furmark. This is one of the reasons there is an aggressive 60 FPS cap on menus and load screens, due to the tendency for that workload to expose instability and even damage poorly designed GPUs (old GPUs, e.g. GeForce 8 series.).
Since this could be related to GPU stability, I suggest capping the maximum frame rate for gameplay in Heroes of the Storm. Try a reliable value like 60 FPS which should be non-taxing for modern GPUs. If the crashes stop happening this would be strong evidence to support an unreliable GPU.
I appreciate the help but I’ve solved the problem. Turns out lowering the audio channels in game fixed the issue.
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Updating your audio drivers, if any updates are available, might help. Disabling audio outputs that are not in use might also help.
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