Uncharted LoTC keeps freezing/hanging on my PC and the only way to "fix" it is forcing it to close using Task Manager

This happened 3 times, first with Lost Legacy and the second and third ones with UC4 A Thief's end. In all instances, the game was "building shaders". The first 2 times, my PC went into screen-saver mode and I "woke" it up. So I thought that's the cause. But the most recent one, which actually happened just today (December 2), happened when my PC was "awake" the entire time. I was just waiting for the shaders to finish building, it was at around 35% and then UC4 just suddenly froze.

In all instances, I couldn't do anything at all, other than alt-tabbing and some other things, but nothing in-game, so I just forced it to close using task manager. The first time, I verified the game's files. The second time, I didn't, and it seemed to work okay the next time I launched it.

Uncharted 4 used to crash often, then for a period of time it worked perfectly fine, no crashes, stable 40 to 60 fps (I'm used to low frames) even on high settings. This latest issue where it freezes or hangs started about a month ago (it's December 2, 2024 as of this Reddit post).

I checked Event Viewer and this is what it says.

"The program u4.exe version 1.4.21058.0 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel."

Source - application hang. Event ID - 1002. Task category - hanging events.

I'm not at all a tech expert but I'm pretty sure I did all or most of the obvious things to keep my games running smoothly, like updating drivers, checking for malware, etc. This issue is starting to really annoy me. I've finished both parts of Uncharted 4 (A Thief's End and Lost Legacy), I'm now in the middle of my second playthrough, alternating between ATE and TLL. I really want to finish them at least twice.

This is on Steam, by the way, and here are my PC's specs.

  • GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB

  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600

  • RAM: 16 GB

  • OS: Windows 11

  • Storage: One 930 GB Kingston SSD as my main, plus another 930 GB Kingston SSD (yes, same brand and capacity but different model) as my secondary. UC4 is installed on my main SSD.

Thanks for any help.

Edit: I launched UC4: ATE again after verifying files, just sat next to my computer waiting for it to build shaders. It finally finished doing that without any freezing or hanging.