Display driver atikmdag/nvlddmkm stopped responding and has recovered

[taltamir]

did you try the TLB fix?

 

[karyan]

Originally posted by: taltamir
did you try the TLB fix?

The TLB fix is to patch the microcode so the CPU doesn't crash and lock your system. I never used it with xp and I still get the video crashing before and after windows update decided to sneak that one in on vista. After I found that it didn't help i removed it to get the 10 % or so that it ganks from you performance wise.

 

[karyan]

on second thought heres another idea why its vista. DX 10 has issues with certain types of geometry shaders. could it be that the computer is cycling the video cards because they want to do the rendering and are workign fine but the OS doesn't realize whats going on? I'll just have to wait and see when sp1 comes out and dx10.1 fixes that issue.

 

[taltamir]

um... vista has NOTHING to do with the TLB fix.the TLB fix is a BIOS update that disables parts of the CPU where the TLB bug occur (reducing your performance unfortunately). patch your bios and set the TLB fix to "on". I could be that in vista you are doing something intensive enough to trigger the TLB.

Now there might be a vista patch that decreases the performance loss in vista with the TLB patch on, but that isn't the TLB fix in of itself.

 

[magreen]

I have the issue with a Dell Inspiron E531 with integrated nvidia 6150le graphics with Vista home premium. Every once in a while the screen goes black for a second and comes back on with the little info bubble in lower-right saying the nvidia graphics driver stopped responding.

Everything is stock in that system, though I added another 2x512mb memory that I pulled from a Dell Dimension E521 box.

Hard for me to believe it's the hardware.

 

[taltamir]

i have actually seen defective build in video in a customer's computer before. it exhibited exactly what you describe. I find it hard to beleive it could anything BUT the hardware causing that particular malfunction.

 

[tommo123]

copy and paste of what i posted in another forum:

i think it's a mix of issues. Vista, overheating or just general bad hardware.

i've seen this with my ATi card once, but loads on my other PC with an nvidia card (same fault, diff err that's all). tested RAM etc and no probs. set the fan @ 100% with riva tuner and the errors i had dropped BIG time. less than once a day. eventually swapped the nvidia card for an old 6800gt and not a peep since. none of these errors happened under xp with either card

my 2c? Vista stresses the cards more than xp so you see these errors. sometimes it's hardware, other times just plain overheating

now with my ATi card, it's a 2400XT so no fan to mess around with so may have been just a onetime glitch.

 

[karyan]

Originally posted by: taltamir
um... vista has NOTHING to do with the TLB fix.the TLB fix is a BIOS update that disables parts of the CPU where the TLB bug occur (reducing your performance unfortunately). patch your bios and set the TLB fix to "on". I could be that in vista you are doing something intensive enough to trigger the TLB.

Now there might be a vista patch that decreases the performance loss in vista with the TLB patch on, but that isn't the TLB fix in of itself.

Trust me. I know that it doesn't which it why its always disabled any more. I'd rather like keeping my extra 10% that it strips away. I was just telling you that it doesn't affect the crashing either way after you asked if i had tried it.

and the thing that magreens computer is doing is that it is cycling the video cards power because vista dropped the ball. but the newer video cards can rehook into the os on a hard cycle like that.

 

[magreen]

Can it cycle the igp's power when it's part of the northbridge?

 

[karyan]

you got me on that one. i missed the word integrated. it does do the power cycling though. ill have to dig up that link about it.

 

[karyan]

gah im an idiot.
i saw it on this thread.

 

[Aberforth]

this error occurs frequently if you over clock your GPU without an aftermarket cooler and cannot be fixed becuase it is hardware related. However you can reduce the frequency of TDR if you set it to stock speed or use a 3rd party cooler. This error has got nothing to do with PSU or voltate settings.

Also nv drivers has to comply with Vista's new display driver model which they are strggling to achieve it. Remember, the programmers at nvdia are extremely incompetant- they took 1 year to write proper dx 10 drivers.

 

[magreen]

Originally posted by: karyan
gah im an idiot.
i saw it on this thread.

LOL

 

[Iarwain]

All right guys, since you all seem to have all the answers, let me explain why it is not hardware related, in my case.

Installed Vista. 32 bit or 64 bit, doesn't really matter. Crashes. Immediately upon opening a game, even just using the desktop, crash after crash. Even with recovery it's unusable.

Specs:
5200+ x2
ASrock Xfire e-sata2
A-Data 800mhz DDR2 2x2gb
Sapphire HD 3870
Silverstone PSU, I can't remember the wattage, however it has 52 amps on a single 12v rail.
Vista x64 or XP

Now to my troubleshooting.

1. Many many passes of memtest and the windows diagnostic tool on all 4gb of RAM, zero errors after many many passes.
2. Remove one stick of 2gb, everything works fine. Assume it is bad. Replace it, and remove the other...again no errors. Any one stick of 2gb RAM, and all is well.
3. 2x1gb sticks work fine, so it is not a problem with the motherboard slot (which would have shown up in memtest anyway)
4. Video card does not crash or error, ever, in XP, even if overclocked to 893/1275, so its not hardware or heat.
5. Reinstalled Vista 6 times now, no change. Reinstalled XP once, and all goes back to normal.

If I forgot to say anything, tell me, I promise I've tried it. Some problem with memory addressing, it has to be that, is causing this to fail, because as long as I keep it below 2gb, and it does not matter at all how I manage to get the 2gb, all is well. I've even tried 4x512MB sticks and it worked fine. I also tried one 1x2gb and 1x1gb, failed. So it's not my memory failing at the 3.5gb mark. (Again, would have shown up in memtest)

I'm sorry, but the answers in this thread are just far too convenient for the people who know how to troubleshoot a problem like this, and yet can find no answer. (And there are quite a few of us, ATI and Nvidia have even acknowledged the problem)

Failure at a specific place where XP can't read but Vista can? What's the chance of that? I understand that a huge chunk of the people having this error ARE overclocking their card, without knowing what happens, or have failing fans, or their computer in a box, or whatever, but to say that it is impossible for this to be Vista related is just a fallacy.

 

[taltamir]

have you tried windows update? there is a well known vista bug with using 4GB of ram...

When I install vista I remove ram until I am left with 2 gigs... install vista. install all patches. And then reinsert the ram.

This has been integrated with SP1. So if you install SP1 to begin with then its not an issue for you.

 

[Iarwain]

Yes, I knew about this, and was using Vista before I upgraded my RAM from 2x1gb sticks to 2x2gb sticks, at that point, I had installed every single update possible, installed the RAM, all hell breaks lose.

 

[taltamir]

so why are you blaming the video drivers? this is a ram + vista issue then.

Also, do you actually get a "Display driver atikmdag/nvlddmkm stopped responding and has recovered", and what do you mean by "all hell broke loose"? could you give specifics?

 

[Iarwain]

Yes, of course I get the driver has stopped responding error, that's what the whole thread is about.

And I never, not once, blamed the drivers from ATI. I realize this is a Vista issue. And by all hell breaking lose, I mean the driver will fail, 3 or 4 times in a row sometimes, and then stabilize for a few minutes until I decided to do something else, albeit with artifacts and/or noise on the screen.

 

[taltamir]

and goes back to XP fixed everything?

 

[Iarwain]

Yes, not a single restart, even overclocked.

And to humor us all I retried Vista again tonight.

I took out 2gigs, installed vista, restarted, downloaded every update, optional, recommended, or otherwise, installed them all, restarted, then restarted again to be certain. Then I installed the video card drivers, turned off, installed the last 2gb stick, and as soon as I tried to switch to Aero on the desktop, massive failure. Talking to you from XP now, just got done with a BFMEII game without a hiccup, with the card at my aforementioned clocks.

I even manually went and searched out the compatibility updates that are available, including the ones that specifically state the 4gb fix, and the display driver has stopped responding "fix"

 

[taltamir]

i would suggest SP1, but from what I hear RTM is basically RC2 and it might change before the final. (which is odd, since RTM indicates it is meant for preinstall on new computers).

 

[zorrt]

Originally posted by: Iarwain
Yes, of course I get the driver has stopped responding error, that's what the whole thread is about.

And I never, not once, blamed the drivers from ATI. I realize this is a Vista issue. And by all hell breaking lose, I mean the driver will fail, 3 or 4 times in a row sometimes, and then stabilize for a few minutes until I decided to do something else, albeit with artifacts and/or noise on the screen.

The same issue actually happened on XP too so its NOT a vista issue. Just wasn't blown out of proportion like it did with Vista I think. I never experienced it on XP so never knew bout it until I installed Vista. Main tip I got was bad ram, pull one out and try with one stick, run memtest. I suppose bad memory can cause it but its not the ONLY cause. There's heaps and I don't think any single thread can solve this issue in every case.

Anyways one suggestion I haven't seen is to increase the NB voltage. I stumbled across this by chance after almost giving up. Just for laughs I went into bios and upped the NB voltage by 0.1v and hey presto, the problem went away. I have it set to 0.025v now though, guess I just needed just that little bit extra juice.

Originally posted by: CrispSandwich
Well i started that other thread where everyone is "whining" and i've tryed all the fixes.

Imho i do not believe it is a hardware problem. Why? because after trying everything possible i decided to go back to XP and since then it has not happened to me once.

Vista64=all my games crashing. XP=No games crashing.

Explain that

Vista is more sensitive to hardware changes/faults. By no means does that mean theres a problem with Vista. By going back to XP you're just avoiding the problem, not fixing it. But hey each to their own, even I originally blamed Vista and went back to XP for a day.

Btw, I know this isn't going to apply to everyone who has this problem, but has anyone tried to set their BIOS to default and running Vista to see if the problem still exists? Might be a good idea to do this before anything else even if you think your BIOS settings are on default, do it anyways so you can be 100% sure.

 

[zorrt]

ooops...double post

 

[Iarwain]

I've tried turning down all overclocking, of course that was my first answer.

It isn't a hardware fault, there's just no way Vista is able to "find" these faults. I would notice something in XP, there'd be artifacting in tests, or overheating, there'd be something that tells me there is a problem.

Nevermind that fact that, if what you say it true, Vista can only be sensitive to hardware changes/faults when there's more than 2gb of RAM in the system, which just doesn't make sense at all. Because otherwise, I can do anything I want, and play any game I want.

But no, it is a Vista issue. Maybe not with Vista itself, lets all be honest with each other, it could be drivers, it could be vista, it could be a combination of how the drivers work with Vista with certain hardware configurations.

I appreciate the help, but, as I've said on many many threads, its responses like that that leave us with the same problem we've had for a bit over a year now. The hardware fault, bad RAM, bad PSU response is fine for people with faulty cards, or overclockers who don't know what they're doing, or someone with a bad stick of RAM. However, if you read my notes on what I've done, I've tested each of those, individually, and I can't find a problem with anything.

 

[eyeballkid]

I have to disappoint all of you people who keep saying this is a software/driver error, it is not. Kudos to taltamir for acknowledging this. I have fixed about two dozen machines where all/some/one game ended with the driver not responding. The solution has always been to more or less follow Nvidias official answer (link below).

Nvidia's Official Answer

- Some of these computers had factory overclocked videocards (mainly 8800 GTs). On these machines all problems disappeared when I set the the card to default reference speeds in 3D-mode with Rivatuner. If this is the case for you I'd recommend to RMA, or if that's not possible to flash your card with a default bios (without OC).

In short. if you keep getting the "nvlddmkm.sys stopped responding..." error message the solution is as follows (assuming your system is rock solid at default speeds):

1. 1. Follow the steps in Nvidia's Answer.
   
   2. Set your system to default speed (no overclock). Remember to give your memory the appropriate voltage through bios (i.e. four sticks of Crucial Ballistix PC6400 DDR2 memory requires 2.2 Volts).
   
   3. Install a fresh copy of Windows Vista (If you have a lot of applications and games installed you could install it on a new hard drive too see it work).
   
   4. Install your chipset, video and audio drivers. I've found the following drivers to be stable and functional in Vista. Both can be found on Nvidia's site: 169.28 for 64-bit Vista, 169.21 for 32-bit Vista (for a 8800-series card).
   
   5. Install Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista (6001.18000.080118-1840).
   
   6. If you have a factory overclocked graphics card use Rivatuner to set '3d performance mode' clocks to default Nvidia reference clocks. (i.e. default clocks for 8800 GT: core 600 MHz, shader 1500 MHz, memory 900 MHz).
   
   7. Install your game including updates. Enjoy!