Understanding and Troubleshooting the “CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED” Blue Screen During Gaming and Browsing: A Technical Overview
Experiencing system stability issues can be a complex and frustrating endeavor, especially when encountering elusive Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) errors. A particularly challenging case involves a Windows 11 environment where a “CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED” BSOD occurs during gaming sessions when launching a web browser afterward. This article aims to distill the reported symptoms, troubleshooting efforts, and potential avenues for further investigation.
Problem Synopsis
The core issue manifests as a BSOD with the stop code “CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED” that appears approximately 10 to 20 minutes into gaming sessions when attempting to open browsers such as Chrome or Firefox. Notably, the system runs stable during gaming alone, and web browsing on its own also does not trigger issues. The problem is characterized by the following behaviors:
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Progressive Game Lag: Prior to the BSOD, the game experiences increasing lag, eventually freezing. Occasionally, the game unfreezes momentarily before freezing again. During some BSODs, a semi-transparent overlay with the last rendered frame is visible.
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Browser Hang and Crash: When launching browsers after gaming, the landing page load process stalls with animated loading indicators, culminating in a system freeze and subsequent blue screen.
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Absence of Dump Files: Despite correct configurations and sufficient disk space, no memory dump files are generated. Event Viewer logs a “Dump file creation failed” error, specifically referencing a “volmgr” error code 0x00040049.
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Recurring Trigger Conditions: The issue consistently arises when gaming sessions involve GPU and SSD activity under load, particularly when both are PCIe devices. Disabling hardware acceleration in browsers appears to mitigate the problem temporarily.
Hardware and Software Environment
The system configuration includes:
- Motherboard: ASUS TUF GAMING Z690 PLUS WIFI (with dedicated PCIe lanes for GPU and storage)
- Processor: Intel Core i7-12700K
- Graphics Card: NVIDIA RTX 3070
- Power Supply: ASUS ROG Strix 750G, 80 Plus Gold, 750W
- Storage Devices: Samsung Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB NVMe SSD (boot drive) and two Seagate IronWolf HDDs in Windows software RAID-1
- Operating System: Windows 11 Home
- Memory: 32GB DDR5-
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