ひげ
Welp, that registry edit fix didn't last very long. Dragon's Dogma 2 character creator crashed my graphics driver hard, had to reset the PC. So now I'm forced to do some diagnostics. Time to break out the backup pieces....
I swear if I have to buy a new GPU bro 
okay first testing with the RAM, it seems like this may be the issue. gonna' swap back to my normal RAM and see if it crashes again. if it does then thank God, i can get away with buying more RAM.
uhhhh swapped back to my RAM and just played an hour of ghost runner.... no issues??? no crashes at all. no idea.
Just had the Dragon's Dogma 2 demo crash again with my newer RAM (default config). Checked out a Reddit page for it and found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/DragonsDogma/comments/1b9dhsu/character_creation_demo_for_dragons_dogma_2/
Seems like it's happening to a lot of people with 20-series cards. I wonder if there was just some weird issue with a Steam update or something that is causing things to get messed up.
In any case, at least for now it seems my initial issue has been resolved? Will have to wait for PSO2 to go back online in a couple of hours to know for sure, but Ghostrunner isn't crashing so that's a good sign.
Maybe all I actually needed to do was unplug my RAM and plug it back in lmao. Who knows. Computers elude me sometimes.
Yeah, looking on Steam there are TONS of people facing issues with 20xx cards. Guess it's not a reliable game for testing my other issue... It's probably unrelated.