All Vulkan applications cause complete system freeze

I am using an Nvidia GTX 970. Any time I run any game or application that uses Vulkan my machine will completely freeze and a single error beep can be heard.

DirectX games work completely fine. I have tried old drivers that I know worked previously and they no longer work. I transferred my GPU to an old Windows 10 machine and Vulkan games run fine. I tried to completely reformat my PC with Windows 11 but the issue still happens.

Vulkan apps run fine on the Windows 11 machine if I remove the GPU and just use integrated graphics from my CPU.

At first I thought it was a hardware issue but since the card runs fine on my old Windows 10 machine, I think it might be a recent Windows 11 update that caused this issue.

I have no idea how to fix this and it’s preventing me from working since I need to use applications that exclusively use Vulkan.

Update, I fixed it by reformatting with an old Windows 11 iso (24H2) and disabling updates. A recent Windows update definitely broke something.

2 Likes

Well, great to hear you could resolved it yourself!

Still, welcome to the NVIDIA developer forums!

Same issue on Windows 10 though, complete hard lock of pc when using vulkan, will try uninstalling updates to see what one broke it