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I have a low-poly model with some mottled texture baked into the normal map, however, when switching to "Viewport Shading" Blender crashes almost immediately if I try and move the model in any way (if I don't move anything it seems ok). It had no trouble baking the normal map, it's only when I try to look at a model that uses the normal map that I have the problem.

There are 89 435 (accidentally applied decimate modifier) active faces in the model and the normal map is a 2k PNG texture. Un-hooking the normal map input on the Principled BSDF shader seems to make the problem go away (but then you have no normal map...)

It doesn't seem to matter whether I'm using EEVEE or Cycles. Turning off ambient occlusion in EEVEE seemed to prevent the crash.

My setup is a Xeon 2186m laptop with 32GB ram and a GTX1070 hooked up via thunderbolt and the latest nVidia Studio Drivers (the crash causes the graphics card to disconnect and it has to be re-plugged to work again). I've never had any other graphics issues with this setup.

This issue seems to be present on Blender 2.83 and 2.90.1. I'm guessing the fact that it's dying with such a simple model means there's something wrong with one or more of my model settings but I have no idea where to even start. Unfortunately I don't have another PC to test with and I've not seen this issue before (although this is my first time working with a homemade normal map).

How do I go about tracing the source of an issue like this?

Edit: Packed textures into .blend file

Edit 2/10/2020: After some more fault finding, it looks like it was being cause by a GPU power integrity problem, dialing the GPU power limit right back below stock seems to have fixed the issue, I might need to stick some extra bypass caps on the card

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  • $\begingroup$ The textures are not packed in your file. $\endgroup$
    – lemon
    Commented Sep 26, 2020 at 8:46
  • $\begingroup$ @lemon I hadn't even considered that they would not be part of the blend file, I've fixed that now $\endgroup$
    – Master Xed
    Commented Sep 26, 2020 at 8:53
  • $\begingroup$ @lemon OK, I think I've packed it properly now, I'm getting a little "unpack item" icon when on the UV editor. Not my best start $\endgroup$
    – Master Xed
    Commented Sep 26, 2020 at 9:00
  • $\begingroup$ No crash here... are your GPU drivers up to date? $\endgroup$
    – lemon
    Commented Sep 26, 2020 at 9:00
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    $\begingroup$ @NoobCat I'm now pretty sure the problem was due to a power integrity issue with the power supply for my graphics card. Sometimes when the card has a sudden jump in utilisation the PSU wouldn't be fast enough, the voltage would dip and glitch the card. I originally though it might have been something in Blender because sometimes I could spend hours in Blender then when switching to rendered view with some models it'd crash but it looks like it had nothing to do with Blender. Power integrity problems are always a nightmare to diagnose 😑 $\endgroup$
    – Master Xed
    Commented Feb 20, 2021 at 7:10

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