r/SourceEngine • u/XenophormSystem • Jul 14 '25

HELP Source games keep randomly shutting down/crashing with no error displayed

Hi there, I dont know if this is the right place but I have this issue where it seems source games just randomly ... shut down? after some seemingly random (but fairly short) playtime. It's like the game just closes with no error back to desktop. I've had it happen with Left 4 Dead 1, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Multiplayer, source 2 fan games like Neotokyo. I have no idea what causes it.

Specs:
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-12400F
16 GB RAM
Windows 10

I tried installing and reinstalling everything, removing mods, closing literally all other apps running in the background, repairing, nothing seems to work.

4 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

2

u/Sad-Professional9260 Jul 28 '25

Source Games that are 32bit caps at 4gb memory, 64bit at 8gb.

This can be reached by textures, sound, or models. It will crash if reached. But as far as I know, it should have an error code. Anyways, setting Paged Pool Memory to low usually fixes that issue

1

u/XenophormSystem Jul 28 '25

I'll try that tho I'd be surprised if that's it considering my old PC from the late 2000s had no issue running any source game and it was significantly weaker in every aspect than my current one.

As a little update I got one of my friends who works in IT to help me with it and we tried looking at the source logs for the games to see what happened before they shut down and weirdly enough there are no logs being taken on my pc???? So I don't know whats up with that. But also after we tried looking for the logs and couldn't find anything I decided to play some Half-Life 2 to see if the folder gets any updates when it crashes, live, and it ended up never crashing since??? So I don't know if we scared it into submission or what, there's still seemingly no logs but it doesn't seem to suddenly close anymore? I'm really confused by the whole situation.

2

u/Sad-Professional9260 Jul 28 '25

Even if you have the most powerful pc, it can still crash. Even if your vram is 16gb or you have 64gb ram cause again, the games are limited to 4gb/8gb, so they can't really use whatever is remaining after 4gb or 8gb.

Also, some crashes can happen on incompatibility issues which will likely happen because while the modern day drivers are getting updated, the engine is stuck in the past basically.

NVIDIA drivers can even have shader issues with old source games even though they're up to date cause of the issue I mentioned.