biodoc
Diamond Member
- Dec 29, 2005
- 6,284
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Remember this problem I was having with my GTX295?
As it turns out, the new drivers didn't solve the problem. After searching on the net, I did find a solution though. Lots of people have seen this issue on Vista (mainly) when the GPU is under heavy load like gaming, dc crunching, etc. The screen goes black for a second or 2 and a popup appears with the message "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" with a reference to nvlddmkm.exe. Apparently Vista monitors the video driver and if the driver doesn't respond within 3 seconds, the system restarts the driver. I guess this prevents hard crashes and lockups. There were a few possible explanations on the net:
1) driver problem (I already had the latest driver with a clean install)
2) hardware issue/weakness under heavy system load (power supply, RAM, faulty Video card (;(), etc
3) GPU/driver under heavy load and does not respond to system within 3 sec timeout
#3 was the problem in my case. This only happened when one GPU WU finished and "uploading" and the other GPU stopped crunching for a few seconds and then the latter WU reported a computation error (screen blacked out and the popup appeared).
The solution from the wizards on the net was to disable the Vista system monitoring of the video driver in the registry:
Under HKLM/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/GraphicsDrivers I added the following:
TdrLevel REG_DWORD with a value of "0" for "off"
No problems now for more than 2 days.
The issue with this solution: If I ever have a legit video driver failure, the computer will lockup or a blue screen "message of death" will appear.
I uninstalled the nvidia drivers then ran driver sweeper. Then I installed 191.07 drivers and now it seems to be working flawlessly in SLI mode.:sun:
I think it was a driver problem. When one GPU workunit finished, the screen would blackout for a second and then recover and I'd get a system message saying the driver failed but successfully restarted. Simultaneously, the second GPU WU would fail with a computation error.
As it turns out, the new drivers didn't solve the problem. After searching on the net, I did find a solution though. Lots of people have seen this issue on Vista (mainly) when the GPU is under heavy load like gaming, dc crunching, etc. The screen goes black for a second or 2 and a popup appears with the message "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" with a reference to nvlddmkm.exe. Apparently Vista monitors the video driver and if the driver doesn't respond within 3 seconds, the system restarts the driver. I guess this prevents hard crashes and lockups. There were a few possible explanations on the net:
1) driver problem (I already had the latest driver with a clean install)
2) hardware issue/weakness under heavy system load (power supply, RAM, faulty Video card (;(), etc
3) GPU/driver under heavy load and does not respond to system within 3 sec timeout
#3 was the problem in my case. This only happened when one GPU WU finished and "uploading" and the other GPU stopped crunching for a few seconds and then the latter WU reported a computation error (screen blacked out and the popup appeared).
The solution from the wizards on the net was to disable the Vista system monitoring of the video driver in the registry:
Under HKLM/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/GraphicsDrivers I added the following:
TdrLevel REG_DWORD with a value of "0" for "off"
No problems now for more than 2 days.
The issue with this solution: If I ever have a legit video driver failure, the computer will lockup or a blue screen "message of death" will appear.
