Hi all,
For some time I was getting the GW502 error. It first began while playing the game for some time. Real soon after that it crashed in the home menu after a couple of seconds when the game was just started. I followed this thread and tried all possible solutions that were mentioned. Revert Game ready driver to 436.15 , uninstalled GeForce Exp., lowered the settings and even did a clean install of Windows as a most desperate attempt. Nothing helped.
I noticed that before Gears5.exe crashed I had a display warning saying that the displaydriver nvlddmkm stopped responding and recovered. But I also noticed that before that I was having a lot of disk warnings with errors during a page operation (ID 51). I recently upgrade my SATA SSD for a M2 SSD and come to think of it thats about the time Gears 5 started crashing. So I gonna put my money on that.
I have a MSI Z370 Pro Carbon motherboard and it comes with an M2 SSD heat shield. It turned out to be more of a heat container. I removed the shield, updated the Game Ready driver to 436.48 (latest) and started the game. I maxed out all the settings and did a benchmark…and what do you know…no crash.
I played gears just now for an hour and no crash.
In my case something else was causing the display driver error and eventually crashing Gears. It looks like gears stresses the storage enough to cause paging errors when your storage cant keep up. In my case overheating the M2 SSD degraded performance beyond this threshold. This seemed to do the trick for me.
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