Since the start of March, I've started experiencing occasional stuttering in gameplay that didn't used to happen before, eventually leading up to a flash of a black screen. Sometimes it's just a brief flash that returns to the game after a moment. Other times it just hard locks my whole computer on the black screen while the music continues playing in the background, requiring a forced reboot. I believe it's crashing my GPU as when I close the game, steam and discord's interfaces are all black and require me to reboot them to make them usable again.

I've so far tried having steam validate the files and I've rolled back my nvidia graphics driver to the January update (using a 2070 super) and neither worked. It happens after about an hour of gameplay or in the middle of urgent missions where there's a lot going on at once, and only seems to happen with this game. No other game has done this, and again this never used to happen until around the start of this month

newer NVIDIA drivers don't break the game, so you can safely fully update again. Also, your best bet is to get the problem to occur again and take note of the time. Then, look for entries with Warning or Critical level that happened around that time in the Event Viewer for Windows.

@Ragnawind Checked through the event viewer, looks like the registered related event is Desktop Windows Manager (dwm.exe) crashing thanks to ism.dll. Tried DISM and an SFC check. Also gonna see if I can check some things in the registry

DISM and sfc came up clean. Looking into another avenue which seems to be suggesting is related to needing to update the firmware for Xbox Series X/s controllers for windows

People were having this same issue earlier this month and it did end up being the controller. They say to update it with the XBOX Accessories app.

Okay, updating the controller seems to have done it. Haven't had any issues since