Are your PC games crashing after the latest Windows 11 update? Microsoft is investigating whether a nasty new bug is the cause — but there are workarounds

Windows 11's August update has broken some PC games Microsoft is investigating reports of crashes, but right now it's unclear what the root cause is Theories point to security measures in the update potentially causing issues with certain drivers and conflicts with anti-cheat tools Windows 11 has run into trouble with gamers ( again ) after the latest monthly update for the OS, and Microsoft is investigating what's gone wrong.

The Register noticed that Microsoft has posted on the Windows release health dashboard about "reports of certain games becoming unresponsive" following its latest patch.

In some cases, games are either freezing and becoming unresponsive, as mentioned, or simply closing (crashing to the desktop), with an error ('Exception Access Violation') being displayed in some cases.

There are also some reports of spontaneous reboots occurring after a game crashes.

Not all PC games are affected by any means, with Microsoft noting that reports are coming in from players of Arc Raiders , Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls , and The Finals .

Microsoft is currently trying to work out what's going on, saying: "Ongoing investigation indicates that this issue is related to peripherals or internal device components which have RGB lighting features.

Such devices may install drivers or code components with file names similar to inpoutx64.

In systems where these drivers are found, the issue is then triggered by launching certain games." Microsoft adds that it's currently trying to "understand the relationship between these RGB components and the games which trigger this issue", and says it will update gamers when more information becomes available.

Analysis: theories and workarounds (Image credit: Embark) Microsoft is suggesting that this may be a driver-related issue of some kind, rather than a problem with Windows 11 itself.

Of course, changes to Windows 11 could be the root cause, and the company admits that, and says it's still trying to "determine if this is an issue caused by Microsoft" on the release health dashboard.

As The Register points out, some on Reddit are theorizing that this bug is to do with "tightened kernel handle validation" which was introduced with the latest patch for Windows 11.

Essentially meaning that Microsoft has tightened aspects of security with the August update, and that this is causing driver glitches, ones that were previously ignored, to be picked up (and subsequently crashing games).

The mentioned driver (inpoutx64) isn't just used in software controlling RGB lighting, but also in some system utilities needing low-level system access (for hardware monitoring, for example, and one such tool is mentioned in the above Reddit post: ZenTimings).