Ooooooooh kay.... I found the issue. So, it turns out that a BIOS update on my ASUS motherboard caused my CPU (which obviously did not win the silicon lottery) to crash when AVX2 instructions were called. I disabled these helpful BIOS settings, retested my CPU (which now did not puke on the AVX2 stress test) and retested the game. And hey, I could play on speed 5 without crashing!
@AndrewT Given the recent issues with Intel 12th and 13th gen CPUs, and how some motherboards like to try to tweak your CPU for you which can disrupt AVX2 performance, you might want to have people run the AVX2 stress test in XTU when they are getting random crashes. If they failed the AVX2 stress test, then they need to check their motherboard for tweaks which would affect it. For me, this was the relevant thread which finally had me track down the issue:
Hi, I built a setup in April 2023 with : - Intel Core i9-13900K - Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero - 2x32 GB Corsair Vengeance 6600 MHz - Asus ROG 4090 - Asus ROG Thor 850 Watts From the very beginning, I had sometimes BSODs, and several apps/games crashing very "reliably". Even though the PC: -...
community.intel.com
For those who might see this thread and also have a ASUS mobi, setting SVID Behavior to Intel's fail safe fixed the issue. BTW, Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool WILL lie to you and tell you that your processor AVX2 is operating correctly, when you can go right Intel XTU, run their AVX2 stress test and it will fail almost immediately.
