In 20 years of building/using computers, never saw anything acting like BF3

[Udgnim]

BF3 "There is no way I'm going to be played on an ancient 19" 1280*1024 monitor. CRASH"

 

[JAG87]

This. As has been mentioned here countless times before, driver CTD's in BF3 are fixed by overvolting or underclocking your GPU. For whatever reason, BF3 requires more power on the video card than they were set for by the factory. Is it ultimately a driver problem, a BF3 problem, or a hardware problem, nobody knows. The fact that increasing your resolution made your problems disappear is likely due to reducing the frame rate, causing the game to be CPU bound, or something similar which caused the card to require less power and thus not crash.

Increasing the resolution decreases GPU load and causes performance to be CPU bound? That's novel....

 

[QuantumPion]

Increasing the resolution decreases GPU load and causes performance to be CPU bound? That's novel....

My wording wasn't clear. I was not implying that one caused the other. They are alternate possible contributing factors.