A week of players yelling into Discord finally moved the needle. Microsoft opened an investigation late on August 19 into reports that its August Patch Tuesday update is breaking PC games, after a studio publicly pinned the crashes on the patch and Microsoft spent several days saying nothing at all.
The update in question is KB5121003, released August 11, which takes Windows 11 25H2 to build 26200.9168 and 24H2 to 26100.9168. The August rollup closed more than 400 vulnerabilities, including one under active exploitation and two publicly disclosed zero-days, which makes the obvious workaround of not installing it not a great idea.
On its Windows release health dashboard, Microsoft lists the symptoms as games becoming unresponsive, closing unexpectedly, throwing an EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION error, or triggering an unannounced device restart. The company named ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals among the affected titles, and asked players to file reports through the Feedback Hub. It has not accepted responsibility, writing only that it is “presently investigating to determine if this is an issue caused by Microsoft.” The KB5121003 support page still lists no known issues.
Embark Studios, the developer behind both ARC Raiders and The Finals, told players on Discord that it was aware of a crash introduced by the Windows update and was working on a fix, and pointed at inpoutx64.sys, a third-party kernel-level port access driver bundled with a lot of hardware tuning and RGB utilities.
We covered Arc Raiders shipping its long-awaited matchmaking fix back in July, so the timing here is rough for a game that just got its footing.
How to check if you are affected: open Settings, System, About and look at your OS build. If it reads 26200.9168 or 26100.9168 and your games started crashing after August 11, you are in the affected population. Search your system for inpoutx64.sys before you do anything drastic, because deleting that file is the targeted fix Embark suggested and it does not cost you 400 security patches. Uninstalling KB5121003 does.
This is the second time in eight months that a Windows security update has wrecked gaming stability, after January’s KB5074109 cost some GeForce owners double-digit frame rates. Microsoft has been pushing bigger and bigger Patch Tuesdays and openly telling admins to expect that going forward. If the cost of that cadence is a week of silence while a live-service game crashes for everyone, the release health dashboard is not doing its job fast enough.
Let us know in the comments if your rig is affected and which titles are misbehaving.
Discussion (4 replies)
Join Discussion →Thankfully I game so little lately that it doesn't matter. part of me wants to game more... part of me wants more sleep at night... being over 50... damnit...
There's plenty of game time after you retire. Ask me how I know.
There isn't a lot of disposable income for building the latest and greatest PC ever made ... which is compounded by current economics.
Yeah don't get me started on that. I make more money than ever and it doesn't go as far as my salary from 10 years ago did. I used to be that guy that built a new PC every year or two. I'd upgrade to nearly every generation of GPU and CPU, etc. Now, I'm looking at my current rig as if it will be my last.
If pricing doesn't return to something more akin to what we are used to, this may very well be my last DIY PC. Granted, the lower price tiers aren't impacted as badly, but I've always been a high end PC build kind of guy. Even if I adopted a longer life cycle for my machines, building a high end PC at current market prices falls somewhere between financially irresponsible and totally impossible to afford.
If I had to duplicate my PC tomorrow it would easily cost me four or five thousand dollars more than I paid for it a year and a half or so ago.
This is my first top tier (not top OC tier) pc ever. I've always in the past bought 1 - 2 tiers from the top to balance performance to budget. I built everything but my GPU replacement right before everything went into the crap for PC parts. In reality I got very lucky. This year I got the 5090... (not so lucky.) But I'm happy with my setup.
And honestly current gen top tier I think is going to have a longer lifecycle than ever before in the consumer space, at least until the VC and Nvidia circular money train dries up.