How to fix random crashes in Dead Space 2 on Zotac 5060 Ti?
I'd be walking through a creepy space station corridor and the game would just freeze and dump me back to the desktop with zero error messages. My Zotac RTX 5060 Ti 16GB XGAMING was only using 6-8GB of VRAM, but the driver was hitting a TDR timeout during specific shader calls. I tried lowering lighting quality, but the crash happened at the exact same spot every time—it was a total guessing game. I eventually used DDU in Safe Mode to wipe every trace of NVIDIA and installed a community-verified stable driver, then manually deleted 2.4GB of shader cache from the C drive. In Event Viewer, the frequent 4101 error codes finally vanished, and my playtime went from 20 minutes to 5 hours without a single crash. I did notice the game took about 30 seconds longer to start after the reinstall because it was recompiling shaders, but it was worth the wait. Temps are stable at 62-68℃ with fans at 1300-1400RPM.
