As of Friday the 30th of January 2026, having installed the latest Windows 11 updates + the latest nvidia drivers, I have been having hard crashes with my 5090 GPU where windows 11 will crash while I'm rendering with Karma, then just quickly display a message on the Black(Formerly Blue) screen of death saying "stop code:SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED(0x7E), what failed dxgmms2.sys" and then reboot. It will always mostly happen when rendering to disk but also sometimes just when launching a viewport render. In fact the crash message is so fast that I had to film my screen while rendering until the crash happened, then I played back the recorded video to read the message.
It caused many days of delayed work and headaches troubleshooting. I tried all nvidia drivers going as far back as march 2025 but problem did not go. What worked for me was switching back to windows 10. Then I tried 2 nvidia drivers, both not causing any crashes at all which lead to the conclusion that windows was the culprit.
I've read other people solving similar problems by rolling back windows 11 updates. Even though win10 is no longer supported for updates, I can at least complete this project. So if anyone encounters this, this may be a possible fix, until, well, I try again some time in the future when I have no important work going and there is confidence that Microsoft got the windows game back in order. I just switched to a win10 installation on a different disk I had lying around, sot he win11 disk is still there. But I had to re-license my Houdini though. So, given the 9 times limitation of switching license, I just hope I don't have to go back and try on win11 too many times and loose my license entitlements.
Linux was another viable option but I'm not sure how the RTX driver support is on that side. But then since I also use Unreal Engine and other window's first software, well...
Thank you Microsoft.

For what it's worth, I am running Rocky Linux 10.1 with the KDE Plasma desktop along with the Nvidia 590.48.01 driver on a 2080ti and everything works fine. No crashes. Installing the Nvidia driver was a bit of a pain but I do have an install script that automates the process if you are interested. Full disclosure, I did not write the script, I don't recall where I got it but it was part of a set of scripts to get Davinci Resolve up and running on Rocky Linux.

Yes, such horrible situation. No need to downgrade to Win 10, just unroll all the recent updates including the infamous KB5074109 security update (Jan 13) and keep them paused till MS gets sober.

tupapioso
For what it's worth, I am running Rocky Linux 10.1 with the KDE Plasma desktop along with the Nvidia 590.48.01 driver on a 2080ti and everything works fine. No crashes. Installing the Nvidia driver was a bit of a pain but I do have an install script that automates the process if you are interested. Full disclosure, I did not write the script, I don't recall where I got it but it was part of a set of scripts to get Davinci Resolve up and running on Rocky Linux.

From all indication Houdini performs better on Linux. Problem is other software which don't even have Linux versions or have poor Linux support. Otherwise, I'd switch to Linux in a heart bear if all I did was Houdini

Keerah
Yes, such horrible situation. No need to downgrade to Win 10, just unroll all the recent updates including the infamous KB5074109 security update (Jan 13) and keep them paused till MS gets sober.

Thanks for the suggestion Keerah. I'll put that windows 11 disk on in there and see if it's a viable option; because I bought the computer this January so I'm not sure if there's a possibility to see a history of updates. I'll check and update here.

You can remove it from here. Windows Update>Update history>Uninstall updates.

Heileif
You can remove it from here. Windows Update>Update history>Uninstall updates.

Got it. Thanks a lot

I have uninstalled the Windows update. But I still get system crashes.
“SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED” dxgmms2.sys

Only when switching to XPU in Solaris and only on the machine with the 5060.
It is impossible for me to render with XPU at the moment. This can not just be windows. Everything else works, just not Karma.

Edit: BUild is 20.0.596
Win 11, 128gb, RTX 5060 16gb, driver 591.74

It's definitely a Karma + Windows 11 + Ndivia problem. Sidefx can look into it for sure but the reason I think windows and/or Nvidia is more yo blame is that a software(Houdini) is not supposed to crash the operating system to the point where it quits so hard and just restarts. It should definitely be the way the OS and driver GPU driver handle Karma calls that causes the problem to the extent the OS prefers to cycle the system.
Ndivia drivers on these 50 series GPUs + Microsoft's update wild frenzy is causing chaos all over the place. So maybe, if you can, switch to Win10 like me and continue your work(With the hope that this works for you as well)

Switching to Win 10 is out of the question for me.... Switching to blender would be easier... But I really, really don't want to do that.

It took me almost 3 weeks to accept that option as well, I had scraped the internet for every ounce of hope. It's temporary for me though. I was tired of giving excuses to my client and the work had to continue so I got a hard drive I had which already had win10 in it, installed Houdini and continued the job. So if it's something that you can move to Blender, good. In my case I couldn't

Oh my, it hurts to read this. Sorry you have to go through this bs, guys. I am on older GPUs, and rolling back the Win 11 updates solves the problem. Does feel like Nvidia drivers take part in this for the 50 series. The last thing to try is to unroll both the MS and NV drivers updates.