"Display Driver has stopped responding and successfully recovered"

[Belgarath]

So basically, in certain games, the screen blacks out for a few seconds, then goes back to normal and it pops up with an error message. The games always crash (except for WC3) The error message tells me that my NVIDIA driver stopped responding and recovered. I did some check-up on this ages ago, something about volt bars or so on the power supply for the graphics card. My PSU is 500ish watt, I don't know anything more than that. Also, if I turn the graphics down it usually takes longer for this to happen.
Games that it happens in: Crysis, Crysis WH, Far Cry 2. It doesn't happen in Assassin's Creed 2, Napoleon Total War, AVP, as examples. If I'm not mistaken, those 3 games are the only ones in that list that use DX10, which my windows runs - FC2 wouldn't run when I set the DX version to 9 in the options.
I attached a screenshot of that message.

So yeah, any ideas on how2fix? It's pretty damn annoying, although its annoying me mostly with FC2 at the moment, so a way to make it run with DX9 would be cool too.

Comp specs are:
2.66GHz Core2Duo E6750
9600GT 512MB
4GB DDR2 RAM (-1GB for the windows stuff)
500GB HDD

I can get more specifics if that'd help or upload the dxdiag log.

 

[Kercyn]

Try uninstalling and reinstalling your DX9 & 10, as well as the GPU drivers. Lame solution, I know, but it usually sovles many problems.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Your card is dieing. Had this exact same problem and symptoms with my brothers 8800GT. It starts off fine then suddenly it starts crashing. More demanding games will crash faster. Eventually your desktop will start crashing. Finally your bios will appear as total garbage (visually, it will be physically fine dont worry) on the boot screen and anything after that will be garbage cause the graphic card is well and truely dead (well extreemly sick).

Fortuantly if your card is newish you can probably get a replacememnt from the warentee. If there is no warente on the card, its new card time.

Graphic drivers might help but if it came on spontaniously and not from an update, I seriously doubt they will do anything.

 

[Belgarath]

i dunno, the problems been about the same with 2 different graphics cards. its only happened since i got windows 7, and i have tried to reinstall graphics drivers quite a lot, even with driver sweeper cleaning them off entirely and getting a whole new install.

 

[HINDYhat]

Same thing happens to me on my 9800 GTX+. Happens much more than it used to now, and occasionally I get artefacts all over my screen after a crash. Unfortunately, I've got no idea how to fix it.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Putting together the fact that it seems unfixable and when it happened to me, my card eventually died (whole screen artifacted and would hang on BIOS) I would generally say it is caused by some hardware defect. It may or may not esclate to fatal levels but it certainly is not normal.

After replacing the defective 8800 GT for a new 8800 GT all crashes instantly vanished and it has not crashed since, even after hours of playing games pushing the card to its limits.

Alternativly it might be temperature related in some cases as those are known to cause this sort of error. Especially since some of you are having hot summers right now it is possible your graphic card is unable to cool itself. In that case download the ntune driver enhancement and try underclocking / upping fan speed to allow it to run cooler. If this does not fix it, it is probably defective hardware.

 

[Belgarath]

alright, cool, i'll try that
thanks

 

[HINDYhat]

I've just tried monitoring temperatures. The card stays at a constant 60 C while idle and gaming... and the crashes still happen. Nothing else seemed irregular.

 

[Dr Super Good]

In that case your graphic card is probably defective if its being caused by simlar problems to my brothers 8800 GT as that was also at a constant 60 degrees and suffered simlar symptoms before eventually dieing alltogether.

If you want a second opinion I advise going to nvidia where I think they have forums of their own but I am pretty sure something is not normal physically with your graphic card as they are not meant to crash at all in opperation.

 

[Belgarath]

yup, same thing again.
thing is that with a friends graphics card, the same thing happened, and it didn't happen in his computer with either one. they were also both win7. although, i'm not even sure that he has any dx10 games :S

 

[Dr Super Good]

Just make sure you are using the correct diver versions. For the 64 bit OS you must use the 64 bit driver and for the 32 bit OS the 32 bit driver.

Also if you change cards, you should uninstall and reinstall the driver (not just update).

I have both a 8800 GT and 275 GTX working perfectly (no driver crashes) in 2 different Windows 7 64 bit machines so it is not the OS. Maybe its just the particualar vendor / cards you have are prone to this.

 

[Illidan_Hunter]

That happened to me also when I was running Windows 7. Back in Vista/XP is works perfectly. I think the driver is outdated or not compatible with W7.
I don't have any other ideeas, thought I don't have deep knowledge in PC Stuffs.

 

[Dr Super Good]

If a complete deinstall and reinstall of the driver does not make any difference (making sure you install the correct version for your OS), then I still strongly believe it is hardware related.

Especially since the errors eithor increase in frequency or appear more often when the hardware is under heavy load. I am certain that most nvidia cards should not be subject to this problem as I have only had it occur once and that was shortly after getting a new computer (where the chances of a failure peak before dropping for most of the systems life until many years later).