Photoshop 2022 (any version, including the most current) randomly hard reboots PC. IS GPU related.

[Greg Presseault]

So, I know that this is a GPU issue since turning off hardware accel fixes the issue, but who wants to deal with PS without hardware accel? 😕

I've tried many different drivers, Nvidia Studio, Game Ready, different versions. Some from only a couple months back to a couple from a year ago. No dice. GPU is a Gigabyte Nvidia 3080ti BTW.

A couple times I've gotten a crash to desktop instead of a hard reboot. Those I've sent to Adobe, but PS says the workaround is to turn off GPU accel and try different drives. BTW I've also tried turning off just some GPU options like OpenCL... Well, all of them but 30bit display, unless I have GPU totally off.

Also, this is a pretty new (4 months or so) computer so this install of Photoshop and all the other software is new on this PC. I did a completely clean install.

Does anyone know a version of the Nvidia drivers that doesn't do this?

System Info is attached as a txt file.

Lastly, my GPU passes all the requirements according to the GPU test in PS.

Thanks! This is driving me crazy and slowing down my work.

[J453]

You said this goes back to 23.0.0? Or did it start with 23.3.0?

A system crash usually means a low level failure such as a driver (bad video card driver, etc), failing hardware (hard disk, video card, etc.) or damaged OS installation. So your intuition that it might be GPU related is probably correct.

I'm not seeing anything off in your system info but can ask someone on the GPU team to take a look.

I do see some 3rd party plug-ins. Try holding down the Shift key when launching Photoshop. Click "Yes" when it asks if you want to skip loading 3rd party plug-ins. Does the system crash still occur?

[Greg Presseault]

Hi Jeffery

Thanks for the response. I don't remember if I switched over right at 23 or at/after 23.3.0. That was right around the time I was putting together my new PC. I'll try to run PS without the plugins and if that doesn't work, I could try reinstalling with an older version. Do you suggest 23.0 or another version before 23.3.0?

The crash/reboots are very random, but I'll get back to you as soon as I know more.

Thanks!

[J453]

There's a couple of other things to try if disabling plug-ins doesn't work:

1. Go to Preferences > Performance... and uncheck Multithreaded Compositing - and restart Photoshop. Does the problem persist?
2. Go to Preferences > Performance... click Advanced Settings... and uncheck "GPU Compositing" - then restart Photoshop. Does the problem still occur?

[Greg Presseault]

OK...

So, I tried all suggestions and did a step by step "removal" of features to try to find the cause. I did this first by;

[Note: None of the below features were reintroduced later. They stayed removed.]

disabling plugins,

multi-threaded compositing,

openCL,

AA guides & paths,

GPU compositing,

30bit display,

use GPU processor... (That's right, it still did it even with hardware accel disabled. lawl.....)

Ironically, the couple of times it crashed instead of hard rebooting my PC, it sent me to the same GPU troubleshooting page that talks about all of this plus drivers, etc.

So, I looked at CPU and GPU temps. All well below anything that would be an issue.

Voltage (was I stressing my PSU,) but no, that was fine too.

Camera raw. Nope. PS 23.3.1 and PS 22.5.7 both are using Camera Raw 14.3.0.1072.

Crash does not happen on PS 22.5.7. I would have tried 23.0 but I didn't really want to uninstall PS yet again. At least, not until I heard back from you.

Lastly, I did "view crash report" during 1 of the 2 times it crashed instead of rebooting, and I saved it into a Word file.

I'm not including it here because it's very long and I have no idea if there's anything in there that I might not want to share. McD's secret sauce, or whatever. I'm pretty confused by it still rebooting with GPU hardware use turned off. I thought that was suppose to be the ultimate, last ditch effort fix? 🙂

Greg

[Greg Presseault]

I forgot to add (and I don't see an edit option) that I have no idea how long this took me since the crash was random. It actually crashed once on the very first raw file I opened. I didn't even get to use the interface! That being said, if you're throwing out discounts or partial refunds on subscription costs, sign me up. This crud has cost me a lot of time and may have hurt my standing with a new client; a rather large invenstment company which will remain nameless for privacy reasons.

It wasn't the testing that slowed me down. That just ate well into my weekend. It was the crashing before that. 😞

Greg

[J453]

So, the whole computer isn't crashing anymore? If Photoshop is just crashing, and not the whole computer, that sounds like progress. If you're seeing the Crash Reporter dialog, lease submit all Crash Reports along with your email address: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/submit-crash-reports.html That will help us diagnose the crash.

[Greg Presseault]

Oh no. It still hard reboots if I use 23.3.1. Even with GPU accel turned off.

I did submit the crash report via the automated system, but not yet via the link you just provided.

Greg

[Greg Presseault]

It's always occasonally crashed instead of rebooting.

[J453]

Thanks. The crash report shows Camera Raw as the component that is crashing.

[Greg Presseault]

Excellent! Well, excellent that you now know.

Is this a known issue? Are others having this crash? Hopefully it's the same bug for the hard reboot.

What I find odd is that it didn't do it for 22.5.7 since I'm using the same version of Camera Raw for both.

Do you want me to try using 22.5.7 more to see if I can get it to hard reboot or crash on that version as well?

Thanks!

[J453]

I have an inquiry out to the ACR team. It might be tomorrow before I hear back.

[Greg Presseault]

Jeff I just realized that this issue might be a bit more complex.

I did some of this testing using an Action in Image Processor because the crash or reboot was random and I was done the work I needed to do. It was the weekend and I needed a break. 🙂 Because of that, the reports you have are from me processing raw files over and over to small jpgs with my copyright info attached.

The thing is, when I used PS organically I would get crashes and/or reboots just from doing random things. I remember one where I clicked a different tab to bring it to the front (possibly just from hovering over it, not sure) and it rebooted. That would have nothing to do with Camera Raw would it? I was already done with Camera Raw and was editing in PS directly.

The only thing that I could think of trying is using the program that completely wipes all Nvidia drivers off a PC and reinstalling the most recent Studio drivers and seeing if that helps. I'm not sure if it will because this is a pretty new PC. Only about 5 months old and its never had a different GPU in it. Different Nvidia drivers, yes, but not different GPUs.

Thoughts?

Greg

[Bruce Kaskel]

Hi Greg,

The engineering team has analyzed the Crash Report case you encountered as this provides us with data of what is happening on your machine at the time (unlike the reboots, where we don't really have any data).

The Crash Report case showed that in that instance it crashed while using ACR inside Photoshop. It is a unique report in our database (we have not seen any others like it). The short story is that something went wrong very deep inside with addresses set up when Windows launched the program. The technical description here would be that the process IAT (import address table) contained a bad address to a Windows system function but the important thing is that this is not common and it is quite strange. From the look of it, it is probably not due to faulty RAM (something always worth checking) but rather it looks to us as if the address was specifically changed or simply not set correctly (which would be quite odd). So this suggests the issue is not really directly related to ACR, even though ACR code happened to be operating when the crash occurred. 

It seems likely that this is somehow connected to the machine reboots although we haven't been able to think of anything which would cause both types of issues.

A program like Ps should not itself be able to trigger machine reboots. Such a problem is more commonly caused by a driver problem (or worse). I don't doubt what you are experiencing but so far we have not heard reports of this happening to anyone else.

Please keep us posted if you find out anything more. Jeffrey mentioned the possibility of a "damaged OS installation". Based on the types of severe problems you are seeing we can't help but wonder if there is some problem there.

Respectfully,

Bruce Kaskel - Senior Computer Scientist II - Camera Raw Engineering - Adobe Inc.

[Greg Presseault]

Hi

Thanks for the report. I must say though, my thoughts on having a completely unique issue is, "ugh."

I'll find a program to check my ram. If you have one you would like to suggest, please let me know.

Something broken deep inside Windows? It's Windows. I don't even know how to respond to that. 🙂

In regards to the hard reboots, does PS not have some sort of active log that it runs that can be looked at later?
Is there an Adobe program that would log that sort of thing that you only give out on a case by case basis for problems like these?

Lastly, in my reply before this one I mentioned that I get these reboots (reboots are about 90% vs 10% for crashing) even doing completely random things that have nothing to do with ACR. I remember once trying to simple switch to another tab I had open and it hard rebooted. That shouldn't have anything to do with ACR. I'm wondering if you're focus on ACR is partly my fault. Because this is such a random problem, I wasn't going to just sit on the PC and do PS work that I actually didn't need to do just to hope it crashed instead of reboot. So I set up an action to open a raw file and resize it to a small JPG in Image Processor. I'm going to set up a different action that does some random things to PSD files and see if I can get it to crash. I'll let you know if it does a hard reboot, but without a way to submit data, the usefulness of such info is obviously limited.

Thanks

Greg

[Bruce Kaskel]

Checking RAM: it's worth doing but I personally think it's a long shot in this case. So it would fall into the category of due diligence in order to rule it out. The old fashioned way required using a test tool like MemTest86 but I believe modern versions of Windows have a built-in ability to schedule a RAM test. A few minutes of searching online should indicate how.

Does Ps have the ability to do active logging as you describe... I don't work directly on the Ps product but I'm not aware of such a thing, no. Besides, if the overall problem is of a similarly random nature as the case we examined it is not clear that would help (if things just go boom at a seemingly random time, logging may not provide much insight).

For any case of a Ps crash (as opposed to a reboot), please always submit it with your email and also let us know about it here. No worries about pointing us to ACR. We need to follow every lead and reviewing that case did provide a lot of good insight for us. It did help to demonstrate how strange a case this is.

But the reboots suggest that something much more insidious is going on as modern operating systems such as Windows 10 are purposely designed so that programs cannot take down the entire computer as they effectively operate in a sandbox which insulates each program from the OS and all other programs. There should be no way a program by itself can reboot the machine (that happening usually implies a driver problem, an OS problem or a hardware problem, though of course Ps or another program could somehow be triggering it). 

REBOOTS: Have you reviewed the Event Viewer to see what it may say about the reboots? Here is a link to a page which provides some guidance on how to do this. 

Bruce Kaskel - Senior Computer Scientist II - Camera Raw Engineering - Adobe Inc.

Votes

[Bruce Kaskel]

Bruce Kaskel - Senior Computer Scientist II - Camera Raw Engineering - Adobe Inc.

[djuncheg1]

Just instnt crash PS itself for me. 

If its start happen - its will crash until im reboot.  And its happen every second run. 

Devs just forgot about stability and optimization.   You no need this stupid things if you monopolyst and have subscribe selling system. So, im dont expect any improvments there. 

[J453]

@djuncheg1 You are probably seeing something different than the OP on this thread. 

I'm not seeing any submitted crash reports from you in our system. If you haven't done so already, please submit all Crash Reports along with your email address: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/submit-crash-reports.html That will help us diagnose the crash.

[Greg Presseault]

Hey Jeff

I haven't run the memory test yet, but I did a few other things. I can say that PSD and TIF files didn't crash or reboot the computer even when using the ACR filter to do things. I placed a bunch of those types of files in 1 folder and ran an Action and had no problem. I tried this is all the main settings; basic, detail, & optics. Optics would only let me use a lens profile if the file matched. I tried to set up an Action where I opened a RAW and applied only the lens profile. I then tried to make the actual Action by using ACR's "Apply Previous Settings" but it didn't work right due to the profile not matching.

While I tinkered around trying to see if I could force a profile onto a file PS hard rebooted. I think that was when I was recording an Action using a specific XMP file that only had the camera/lens profile in it.

I have everything from the Event Viewer at, Windows Logs / System from the point of the critical error up to until Windows finished rebooting.

I need an email to send this set of event logs too.

Thanks

Greg

[J453]

@Greg Presseault Sent you a direct message.

[Bruce Kaskel]

Hi Greg.

Thanks for the Event Viewer data you provided us. It seems to indicate a HW problem of some type (either with the CPU or with some type of interaction between the CPU and some other HW).

A fatal hardware error has occurred.

Reported by component: Processor Core
Error Source: Machine Check Exception
Error Type: Cache Hierarchy Error
Processor APIC ID: 8

The details view of this entry contains further information.

So this is apparently saying a problem related to the CPU was detected. 

The computer info you provided in the original post above indicates you have an AMD CPU (which looks to be either "Athlon" or "Opteron", if we're interpreting the codes listed there correctly).

A quick web search on "Cache Hierarchy Error" turns up (relatively rare but still plentiful) cases of AMD cpu users having very similar problems, many (but not all) from gaming. 

Here are just a few relevant links / discussions we quickly found:

Ryzen 5 3600 Fatal hardware error - Cache Hierarch... - AMD Community

WHEA: Cache Hierarchy Error Processor Core 

https://community.amd.com/thread/232625 

https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/hq7jcu/cache_hierarchy_error/ 

Given the Event Viewer report data, reading through these links strongly suggests to us that these are the same types of problems you are seeing also when it comes to the reboots. 

The resolutions of problems in these reports is pretty varied. Some modified overclocked settings (do you know if you have an overclocked machine?). Some replaced CPUs. Some replaced GPUs. Some found that disabling Windows Fast Startup feature in the system's Power Options (and/or the BIOS?) fixed the problem for them (for example, see https://www.windowscentral.com/how-disable-windows-10-fast-startup). There are probably other ideas worth trying in the links above so I would encourage you to follow this trail.

We're not experts on this CPU hardware subject so we're now mainly repeating things we read in the links above. But here are some thoughts we have...

Have you built this machine yourself? If so, definitely read through some of the discussions linked above. If you purchased the machine you may want to contact the manufacturer and indicate you are experiencing these types of HW problems.

Some things to try (that we read about when reading through some of the links listed above)...

If you know the machine has been overclocked, maybe backing that down would be good. I'll assume henceforth that this is NOT the case.

Disabling the Windows Fast Startup as mentioned above in the Power settings (or maybe even the BIOS?) would be a simple starting point to see if that could either fix or improve the issues as a couple of people reported that helped them.

Otherwise some people found changing the GPU in the machine could help.

Others had luck changing the CPU but if you did not assemble this yourself you should have the manufacturer deal with that if it reaches that point.

Please let us know if there is anything else we can do to help but given the HW error report it appears to us to be an issue of a hardware problem with your system.

Also, if you do find a resolution which works telling us about it here would of course be helpful, as would marking this reply as the Correct Answer should it prove to be so.

Bruce Kaskel - Senior Computer Scientist II - Camera Raw Engineering - Adobe Inc.

[Greg Presseault]

Hi Bruce

Yes, my PC is overclocked a bit. Just what my Gigabyte MB has as default for my CPU and RAM.

BTW, that hardware is,

GIGABYTE X570 Aoruis Pro Wifi

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti

CRUCIAL DDR4-3603 / PC4-28800 DDR4 (2x32GB)

The only reason I didn't mention it sooner was because the inital bug report said it was a driver/compatibility problem. I was going to mention it in my previous messsage but I forgot. 😕

I'll set it to default tonight and re-run the tests to see what it does.

My one question is why is it showing up as a type of hard reboot when absolutely no other program I use does it. In fact, I confirmed the other day when doing a set of actions that never used ACR on PSD files (so, again no ACR) that PS does not crash.

I know PS uses extensions that some other programs don't, but I use a lot of different programs and it being confined ACR seems odd to me, but certainly not impossible.

Oh, one last thing. Does PS have a known memory leak? When I did those PS actions on the PSD files (400...) PS had used up 82% of my 64GB of RAM. I know that's an crazy number of files to do an action on, but shouldn't PS be releasing that memory once it closes each file?

Thanks,

Greg

[Greg Presseault]

All OC turned off.

Still hard rebooting and crashing. Seems to still be ACR. I sent in a new crash report. Event log for the hard reboot was exactly the same as last time. 😞

[Greg Presseault]

Jeff, can you help explain to me how this is happening to only ACR and not a single other program I use?

I mean, lets say it is a problem with core 8. How am I suppose to explain that to AMD when it only affects a single plugin of 1 program? Or, if it's it's interaction with another piece of hardware, my issue and solution are possibly even more problematic.

Thanks!

[J453]

I'll need to ask @Bruce Kaskel in engineering.