ZOTAC FIRESTORM WINDOWS 8.1 BUT I

I doubt seriously it is Firestorm, but it could be a specific software conflict. This has not been the story in the past.So, I am guessing that there has been a change in Windows (could certainly be true with other operating systems to) that are causing the problem.My Windows updates automatically when I sleep and SOMETIMES it isn't a positive thing (not new news). IF I reboot my computer and only have ME on then I am OK.

Zotac Firestorm Windows 8.1 But I

Think of things that you really don't HAVE to have for your photo and change those settings in Preferences.I just tried using a different WL setting and it didn't crash on me this time, I was using the Phototools WL settings and just used the TOR ones then and it was fine.I am using Windows 8.1 but I will try a few things as you suggested.So had I been more PERCEPTIVE, the comment about a different Windlight would have made more sense. Even turning down your draw distance might solve your issue. That translates into 'simplify' in whatever way you can.

This is basically because, instead of high res shots being made up of lots of smaller shots stiched together, the snapshot is saved at the actual size you choose to take it, which puts much more stress on the graphics card and can easily crash the graphics driver. Just adding that for folks finding this thread.It's nothing to do with the windlight setting.The windlight setting will change how apparent the shadows are or at what angle they render, but when Shadows are enabled in graphics preferences, they are always present & the system has to deal with rendering them, even if you don't notice them that much because of the windlight setting.The Shadow Quality setting is very hard hitting on the system if you raise it above default.A good system won't have too much trouble with a performance decrease when raising the shadow quality setting, but it's a whole different ballgame when you take a large size snapshot.Snapshots taken at a size greater then the current viewer window size used to be made up of a bunch of smaller sized images which were stitched together - however this often caused seams in the stitched images - the 'tiling bug' - VWR-21917 & FIRE-4725Since the fix for the tiling bug on high res snapshots went into the viewers (this was the bug that caused ugly 'stitch lines' to show up on high res snaps when the snapshot size was higher then current window size), an unfortunate, though somewhat expected, side effect to this fix is that your graphics driver will crash much more easily when taking super-sized snapshots with shadows enabled. Depth of Field can be a killer too depending on the settings and of course if it is paired with shadows. If there are no shadows then the 'shadow resolution' setting doesn't come into play (or not much).