Corrupted video and video driver crashing...

alizee

Senior member
Aug 11, 2005
501
0
86
I've started to play Neverwinter Nights 2 (I realize I'm late on the bandwagon...), but it's been wreaking havoc on my system. I didn't see any of these issues last month when playing Hellgate: London, which I would have imagined to be more GPU intensive.

I initially thought it was the new GPU that I just purchased used (9800GTX), but it started happening with my old GPU (8800GT). Both are stock, not factory overclocked cards.

The issue is one of three things:

A. NWN locks up and I can't alt-tab out, the audio plays the last second in a loop. Resolved by pressing the reset button to restart the computer.

B. NWN shows graphics corruption (the sky shows bands of green, colors look inverted, etc) and I can alt-tab out to the desktop with no graphics corruption. This happened more when I had the side of my case off and I ran GPUz and it said the 8800GT was about 80°. If I let it sit at the desktop for a minute or two, the GPU would cool down and I didn't see any more corruption until it heated up again. This hasn't happened since I put the side of my case on and the GPU has been at about 70°.

C. This one happens most often. NWN shows some graphics corruption and locks up, I alt-tab to the desktop and I see a baloon pop-up in the bottom right that says "display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered". While at the desktop I start seeing a bunch of little dots everywhere. I took some pictures with my phone and uploaded them here. The first three pictures are with the 8800GT and the last two are from the 9800GTX.

I did some searching and found some posts on other forums, this one in particular from Major Geeks. It mentioned an update from microsoft that I installed, but it didn't resolve the issue.

Any pointers would be great. Thanks for looking, and thanks in advance for any suggestions. I do have a Radeon 3870 to test with, if needed, but I won't have that card very long so it wouldn't be a good long term solution.

System specs:
Core 2 Quad Q9450 @ stock
Gigabyte EP45-DS3R
4x2GB DDR2-800, 2 from A-Data and 2 from g.skill
500GB Seagate 7200.10 SATA boot volume
625W Enermax Modu 82+

ECS 9800GTX
XFX 8800GT
 

mpilchfamily

Diamond Member
Jun 11, 2007
3,559
1
0
If you don't have any problems with any otehr games then its the game itself that is having some sort of issue with your hardware. Otherwise if you have the problems across the board its sounding like a bad video driver. If thats the case you'll need to boot into safe mode. Unistall the drivers and use drive cleaner to make sure they are completly removed before going in and installing the new drivers.