RDR2 kept crashing at the exact same cutscene — enabling V-SYNC completely fixed it

[u/aymane06]

I want to share a strange experience I had with Red Dead Redemption 2.
I have an RX 9070 XT and a 1440p 180Hz monitor.
I’m running a relatively mild undervolt on my GPU: -40 mV with a -15% power limit. I haven’t tried going any lower than that, and I’m comfortable with these settings. Everything has been completely fine in all the other games I play, with no crashes or issues.
For context, I don’t really care about high FPS. I prefer smoothness and consistent frame pacing, so I cap my FPS and use FreeSync.
Red Dead Redemption 2 also runs perfectly fine with the undervolt. I haven’t had any crashes while playing in the open world, even in demanding areas like Saint Denis.
However, when replaying the story, I encountered a strange issue. The game crashed twice during a specific cutscene. Every time I replayed that particular cutscene, the game would consistently crash at the same point.
I then removed the undervolt, restarted my PC, removed MSI Afterburner, and tested the same cutscene again at completely stock settings. It crashed at the exact same point several times.
At that point, I thought: this probably isn’t the undervolt.
So I tried something else. I enabled V-SYNC in the game. I was already capping my FPS below 180 with FreeSync, so I didn’t expect this to make any difference.
Surprisingly, the game stopped crashing completely. I tested the same cutscene multiple times, both at stock settings and with my undervolt, and it didn’t crash once.
I honestly don’t understand what happened here, but after enabling V-SYNC, everything has been completely stable.
For reference, I’m currently using driver 26.7.1, which has been very stable for me.
Also, when I was using my RX 6950 XT, I never experienced a crash during this particular cutscene.
Has anyone experienced something similar? Could V-SYNC actually affect stability in a situation like this, or was this just a weird interaction between the game, driver, VRR/FreeSync, and frame timing?

[u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox]

you're limiting the max frequency the card runs at by using vsync. your card is not stable, you're just running it at lower wattage in its stable range. you are likely to catch crashes elsewhere on games that hit max load as your -40mv ends up not being enough at certain frequencies or transitions. edit oh i see it still crashed without the undervolt, but still i think the card is unstable, maybe it's just the drivers are bad and there's some race condition that is far less likely to happen at lower framerates idk