DS2 PC, game constantly crashing at the desert. *Chapter 7 Story Spoilers*

I'm about 35 hours into the game and it was running smoothly up until now. I was doing the order to go the weapon factory to extract and destroy the data there, everything was fine until i started traveling back to the Magellan and the crashes has been constant since. Hell i even had to power through a sandstorm on the way to the factory and the game was fine with that but the hike back with a clear sunny weather? Nope, the game didn't like that. I did notice some flickering in the sand before the crashes however.

I turned down my graphics settings down to the medium preset and eventually i got back to base, I started doing the order to retrieve the coffin at the nearby enemy camp but as soon as i got the coffin and crossed the river again the crashes continue. Finally made it to the Mechanic to turn in the order and the game crashed during the evaluation. Booted back up and the game put me back at the Mechanics terminal, turn the order in again, AND IT CRASHED AGAIN.

My PC has a Powercolor 6800 XT, Ryzen 5800X, and 32GB of RAM. My usual Graphics settings were a mix of High and Very High with PICO set to Quality and FSR 3.1.6 Frame Gen. Drivers are up to date. My Display settings are set to 3440x1440 and 21:9 and i'm not using HDR at all (This game is gorgeous in Ultrawide btw). Changing these settings had no affect of the frequency of the crashes.

I'm going to redownload some other demanding games and test them out, hopefully these crashes are just the game and aren't a sign my GPU is slowly dying.