Games crashing since August 11? One old driver file explains it

ARC Raiders players spent last week losing matches to something other than the game. Crashes straight to the desktop, "Hang detected on GameThread" errors, EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION messages, and on some PCs a full Windows reboot mid-firefight. The Finals and Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls were doing the same thing. The common thread turned out to be one old file: inpoutx64.sys.

It's a third-party kernel driver that hands programs low-level access to hardware ports, and it arrives on plenty of PCs quietly, bundled with fan-control apps and other hardware utilities - Razer's updater among them. Windows 11's August 11 update, KB5121003, changed something that broke compatibility with it. Embark Studios, which makes both ARC Raiders and The Finals, confirmed the link on its Discord and published a workaround: stop and delete the inpoutx64 service, remove inpoutx64.sys from C:\Windows\System32\drivers, then restart. Several players report that simply disabling the service is enough.

A shorter, odder list of complaints is attached to the same update: refresh rates dropping, black screens, HDR misbehaving, and a handful of reports of Windows Hello demanding a fresh PIN setup after every reboot because the credential container won't load. Microsoft's own release notes for KB5121003 still say it "is not currently aware of any issues with this update," which is the line that stands until it doesn't.

This isn't an argument for uninstalling the update - it closes a flaw attackers were already using in the wild. But if your games ran fine on August 10 and don't now, go looking for that driver before you start suspecting your graphics card.

Tendvane can back up every driver on your PC to a folder you keep and import them again later, which is cheap insurance in a month like this one.