Question Recent freezing screen problem in games

[tinpanalley]

I'm not sure if this is purely GPU based, but perhaps someone can help. I have a Radeon R9 290.
It seems as though recently, and only with certain games that aren't even my heaviest graphics games, when scrolling through menus, or when a game goes from one menu to the next, the screen will freeze in transition. Often it requires a CTRL-ESC and back into the game to unfreeze. Gameplay is fine, but the moment I pause to go to the menu, flipping pages or even in and out from submenus causes this visual freeze again. Audio is still heard. I use my GPU for video editing rendering, for even more graphically intense games than the ones causing problems without any issues. For the time being, it appears EA Sports games menus are problematic. Any ideas what this could be, if it's GPU related or otherwise, and what I might try to fix it?
Thanks!

 

[Shmee]

Hard to say exactly what it is, but there are some troubleshooting steps you can try. First, could we know what drivers, windows version you are running, and which 290 model and clocks? Also specs on the rest of the computer.

You could start with eliminating hardware problems, or discovering them, by running stress tests/diagnostics, and check drive health. Also check for driver updates and game fixes/patches.

 

[tinpanalley]

First, could we know what drivers...clocks

What drivers are we talking about. Don't know what clocks are.
What stress tests and diagnostics can I run?

 

[tinpanalley]

Drives are healthy according to Crystal Disk Info
Some specs:
GPU - Sapphire Dual-X R9 280
Win 10, i5 2400 @3.10, 16GB RAM

Everything has played fine until recently when this menu switching issue started happening and sometimes it doesn't happen at all. And in some games, with far higher graphics demands, play perfectly fine.

 

[Shmee]

Oh is it an R9 290 or 280? The Radeon drivers are the ones that are important to know what version. For stress testing, start with memtest86, prime95 or CPUz stresstest, and furmark or OCCT.

 

[tinpanalley]

Oh is it an R9 290 or 280? The Radeon drivers are the ones that are important to know what version. For stress testing, start with memtest86, prime95 or CPUz stresstest, and furmark or OCCT.

Definitely 280. I just updated to the latest drivers. I'll dig into these stress tests. Funny I just loaded one of the games and it had no problems at all. Played perfectly.