Display driver nvlddmkm has stopped responding and has successfully recovered.

Craig321 · 27 Aug 2008 at 21:02

I recently got my graphic card replaced (BFG 8800GTX 768MB) due to black screen lock-ups which eventually resulted in a nvlddmkm.sys BSOD. BFG confirmed by card was faulty and they replaced it.

However, now I'm getting the horrible "Display driver nvlddmkm has stopped responding and has successfully recovered." error randomly during games.

Basically the driver will crash which will cause the game to crash to desktop, the screen will then come on and off each time telling me that the display driver has been recovered successfully. This can sometimes end up in a BSOD which I assume is when it fails to recover the driver. If it doesn't BSOD Vista will keep trying to recover the driver until I reboot.

I've tried 169.25, 175.16, 175.19 and even the beta 177.92 drivers, all of them give exactly the same problem.

Each time I tried different drivers I did the following:
- Uninstall drivers from the "Uninstall a program" section
- Uninstall drivers from device manager
- Reboot into safe mode
- Run driver sweeper
- Install drivers
- Reboot

I've not overclocked anything.

There are multiple nvlddmkm.sys files on my PC... 7 to be exact. There's an extremely old version of it in multiple folders similar to the following: "C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\nv_lh.inf_7028394d" - could that be causing any issue?

The nvlddmkm.sys in C:\Windows\System32\drivers matches the size, date and time of the one unpacked from the installer.

I don't have Dreamscene installed, never have.

Any ideas please?

Thanks,
Craig.

Craig321 · 28 Aug 2008 at 14:06

Vince · 28 Aug 2008 at 14:30

Hi Craig,

This is a very common issue with both ATI and Nvidia cards. I found that I could force my cards to do this if I had an unstable system or overclock on the GPU or the CPU or even if my ram OCZ wasn't being supplied with 2.1v (box says 1.9v).

First thing I would try is bringing everything back to stock speeds, and then booting up into safe mode and removing the nvidia drivers, running driversweeper and then reinstalling the latest WHQL drivers.

If this is still persistant there are a few things you can do to try and get a bit of stability, firstly I would try underclocking the card by a small bit possibly 50mhz on both core and memory. If the card is causing problems because of being faulty or because it cant achieve it's standard clock speeds 100% stable then underclocking may just clear that headroom and prove that the card is not quite right.

Ive come across this pretty often, some say that it can be caused by Aero in Vista so it might be worth a shot turning that off, if you are running vista that is.

Let us know how you get on.

Craig321 · 28 Aug 2008 at 15:30

I've had my RAM at 2.1v since day one, just tried 2.2v and 2.25v (recommended is 1.8v ~ 2.3v) - neither setting helped.

Also tried with Aero off.

Not sure that underclocking the card would help really, this is a new card replaced by BFG a few days ago.

Vince · 28 Aug 2008 at 15:57

It's one of those weird ones, I find this error pretty simple to replicate on my p4 / 6800gt rig. I simply take the gfx card one notch to far on the overclock and the driver persistantly stops responding.

I am not saying that its the case here as you say its a new card.

Other than the above I am not sure, I am assuming that you have the latest chipset drivers?

Craig321 · 28 Aug 2008 at 16:23

I'll give underclocking it a go, I'll go down in steps of 50Mhz until I reach normal 8800GTX speeds (this card is the OC2 edition).

[Edit]
Just realised I'm a whole version behind on chipset drivers, I'm still using v8 which was provided on the Gigabyte website, downloading v9 from Intel now.

[Edit]
Anyone know how to update chipset drivers properly? It's just going straight to the finished page with me, not installing anything

Vince · 28 Aug 2008 at 16:50

Sounds good let me know how you get on.

EDIT : Chipset drivers should just be a case of install the exe.

Craig321 · 28 Aug 2008 at 19:48

Running the latest chipset drivers and also underclocked by 50Mhz, neither of those helped

Vince · 28 Aug 2008 at 22:22

Have you got another machine you can test the graphics card in?

Craig321 · 29 Aug 2008 at 00:56

Yep, I did just that today.

I stuck my brothers 4870 into my PC, installed the drivers and played longer than ever before without even a hint of any problem.

Looks like this card's going back to BFG

Vince · 29 Aug 2008 at 09:39

Good news that it's the card or a driver issue with the card.

Sometimes hardware just conflicts with other harware for one reason or another, back in the day when the Radeon 9700pro was released I was an early adopter. Unknown to me the card was set out to be a nightmare from the begining, I got constant crashing and audio loops.

I tried everything drivers, irq's, bios updates, pretty much everything I could think of. In the end it turned out that the chipset had conflict issues with the card. Sometimes I guess it's just the luck of the draw.

I would however be interested in seeing if the issue still occurs if the GTX OC2 was clocked back down to standard GTX speeds.

Phil2008 · 29 Aug 2008 at 11:56

could it be your motherboard somehow killing the cards?

Vince · 29 Aug 2008 at 12:00

unlikely I would have thought as he put his brothers card in and gamed fine for a long period.

I would suggest a compatability issue somewhere, or a card which isn't stable at its standard clocks. Many people only experience this issue when going over to vista from XP, because XP isn't as hungry (efficient) at using resources.

Craig321 · 29 Aug 2008 at 13:49

VinceB1 said:
Good news that it's the card or a driver issue with the card.

Sometimes hardware just conflicts with other harware for one reason or another, back in the day when the Radeon 9700pro was released I was an early adopter. Unknown to me the card was set out to be a nightmare from the begining, I got constant crashing and audio loops.

I tried everything drivers, irq's, bios updates, pretty much everything I could think of. In the end it turned out that the chipset had conflict issues with the card. Sometimes I guess it's just the luck of the draw.

I would however be interested in seeing if the issue still occurs if the GTX OC2 was clocked back down to standard GTX speeds.

I put my GTX OC even lower than GTX stock speeds, they only put 25Mhz on the core for the OC edition, I lowered both memory and core 50 Mhz

Phil2008 said:
could it be your motherboard somehow killing the cards?

No, this 8800GTX has been faulty since the day BFG sent it. My brothers card would also have broken if my other hardware is killing the card.

VinceB1 said:
I would suggest a compatability issue somewhere, or a card which isn't stable at its standard clocks. Many people only experience this issue when going over to vista from XP, because XP isn't as hungry (efficient) at using resources.

A few months ago I could play games for hours on end under Vista, it then developed a problem where the screen would go black and the computer would freeze. I got that one replaced and they sent me this card which has a completely different problem.

So the card was working with the computer perfectly, I don't think it's a compatibility issue really, especially as the issue has changed with the replacement card.

I think BFG simply sent me a faulty card, the one they sent me looks older than my original 8800GTX.

I'm going to RMA this one