Alt+Tab Toggle apps immediately after starting Render crashes Windows completely

[tristansummers]

Hard to repeat but I have managed to crash my machine completely several times today by Alt+Tab toggling to a different app immediately after hitting Render.

Which is a very normal thing to do.

Latest AE, Windows etc.

unfamiliar freelance work machine, maybe it is an old quadro thing

HP Z4 i9 10900X Quadro RTX4000 32GB  RAM

Tris

[nishu_kush]

That's not ideal. Not sure what could cause this. I am assuming you've already updated the GPU driver. If not, that's the first thing to do. Have you experienced this issue with any other app? Are there any error messages? Do you get a Blue Screen when the computer crashes? If yes, take a picture of the error on the Blue screen and share it here.

Let me know.

Thanks,
Nishu

[tristansummers]

Hi

I always keep GPU drivers and Apps completely up to date.

I think this is a latest AE build stability issue.

(This is happening more and more as the App gets pushed out of Beta prematurely to satisfy new feature obsessions.)

Ae is able to crash the machine at other times as well.

I just opened an advanced 3d scene with an enevironment light which scared the quadro RTX 4000 to death.

[nishu_kush]

Can you try changing the following (screenshot) settings in the Nvidia Control Panel could help? It has helped users with similar issues.

Let me know how it goes. Moving this thread from Bugs to Discussions for troubleshooting.

Thanks,
Nishu

[tristansummers]

I can try, but as you can see, that is for a Geforce card not a pro card, so it may not have the effect.

I doubt it has anything to do with the GPU.

I have never had this in 25 years of After Effects so I assume it is something new.

Be good to hear about possible things that can crash AE on app toggle.

[nishu_kush]

There's not much that we can troubleshoot when the whole computer crashes. In most cases, it is either the GPU driver or something related to the power consumption. We can try collecting the log file from After Effects and investigating it. It may or may not capture the information regarding the crash but we can give it a try. 

Here's how you can collect the log file:

1. Start AE
2. Help Menu => Enable Logging
3. Restart AE
4. Reproduce the issue.
5. Help Menu => Reveal Logging Files...
6. Find the "After Effects Log.txt" file and copy/paste the content back to this forum thread.

Thanks,
Nishu