Driver Has Stopped Responding - Nvidia Driver Crashes

[Neil79]

Can those of you who have had any Driver Has Stopped Responding and or Driver Crashes in games with the latest drivers more especially 353.06 and 353.12 please reply.

It seems to be happening to more and more people now with Nvidia based cards, as such ManualG has stepped forward requesting more information, see here - http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=399780

Most people are pointing fingers at Nvidia, while others are pointing them at MSI Afterburner and EVGA Precision.
http://forums.evga.com/m/tm.aspx?m=2343546&fp=1

It happened to me today as well, in all I counted nigh on 16 driver has stopped responding crashes while using chrome (HW ACC OFF) and one driver crash while playing Witcher 3 causing it to corrupt all my recent saves. The previous driver 347.88 and 350.12 have been perfect. My 980 GTX has been faultless since purchase

UPDATE : Perhaps a Maxwell only issue?

Yeah I it can't be a coincidence. They did something to un-gimp Kepler based cards and now Maxwell has problems.

************ POSSIBLE FIXES ************

Revert to the Nvidia 350.12 drivers a good number of members are now reporting these drivers have fixed their "Driver has stopped responding" in Chrome, Firefox and crashes in The Witcher 3.

Or try the Nvidia 353.00 drivers, worked brilliantly for me!

Lastly Nvidia 352.94 drivers, Guru3D rates these drivers very highly

If you are using EVGA Precision or MSI Afterburner make sure to set the monitoring polling rate to at least 6000 or 7000, some users have reported a low polling rate has caused driver has stopped responding with the latest drivers. ( Good number to set for any Nvidia driver )

Disable Hardware Acceleration in Chrome and or Firefox

Setting PhysX to Auto or CPU in CP has fixed crashes for some people in The Witcher 3

Enabling K-BOOST only while playing games, be warned this will cause your card to use all of it's potential in games, full core clocks and volts. This may fix the TDR of lower power mode when it shouldn't be doing as such in games. Turn off K-Boost when in windows.

25/06/15 UPDATE FROM NVIDIA

Originally Posted by ManuelG View Post
Correct. Thanks to everyone for their help. We will be releasing a hotfix driver soon which we hope addresses the desktop TDR issues that users reported with drivers newer than 350.12.

Not sure if I can go into detail but suffice to say it was timing related which is why it was very difficult to reproduce in our labs for so long and thus why it took a while for us to root cause the problem.

26/06/15 UPDATE FROM NVIDIA

ManuelG said:
Just wanted to give everyone a heads up for the hotfix driver to address desktop TDR issues users have been reporting with the most recent drivers. The hotfix driver has passed QA testing and we have also reached out to a dozen end users who have posted feedback that they were experiencing desktop TDRs with drivers 352.86 and above and those users all came back saying the driver fixed the issue for them. The hotfix driver will be posted later today. This driver also includes a fix for a bug that would introduce a 5 second delay when alt-tab in a game if you have an SLI configuration with a G-sync monitor

AND DRIVER RELEASED

http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3694/

"This is a GeForce Hot Fix driver, version 353.38 that addresses the following issues:

Chrome Crashes/Freezes/TDRs
Delays when starting or switching apps & games with GSYNC enabled"

https://forums.geforce.com/default/...vers/announcing-geforce-hotfix-driver-353-38/

21/07/15 UPDATE

People are still having problems with TDR's and game crashing, most with these problems have gone back to the 350.12's and have had no problems since. Do not use the 353.51 leaked NDA drivers, they may well give you a grey screen of death

 

[Neil79]

More :

Getting freeze / lock up thing again while browsing tonight, and the dreaded kick out to desktop on Witcher 3 after about 10mins play. Going back to 350.12. Lol what is going on.

Uninstalling and reinstalling did it for me, everythings fine on 353.06.

Did have one display driver error but I was benching and pushed a little to high

Forget about the above, it just crashed when I was reading the Guru3D forum and came back to this tab

I just had 2 crashes on the desktop today within 20 seconds of booting up my comp!

This 353.xx series is the worst driver set I've ever used. I have never had issues like this before, ever. I often read threads about people having problems with drivers and think it must be user error or people being daft, but now I know how it feels.

What are Nvidia playing at? Why have not released a fix for this yet?

Upgraded to the 353.06 today and got a crash in Witcher 3 after 4 hours, no previous crashes ever before with W3 and the last driver

New drivers crashing in all games for me now,none with browsers tho. Bak to 347.88 the last decent/stable driver. Really want to get off nvidis cards now,drivers have been shoddy at best since i got this 970 at launch.Tw3 crashes all the time just given up on it now.

I have no idea, however I do know that for me, 352 made my GPU run at 100% causing stutter in GTA V

353 Caused driver crashes whilst using chrome + 100% usage on GTA V

Back onto 350 and no issue at all. GPU sitting at 70 - 80 on GTA V, 60 FPS and no further driver crashes.. (my other issue has gone away now as well but that was there before 350)

Happy with 350 and see no reason to move on.

I know that is not an option for many with newer games.

 

[Neil79]

I've been getting it quite a bit with the last 2 driver updates and a grey screen with and without oc in place with a 970gtx. With evga px

Happened while playing cs go earlier

Even had it while watching Sky go or you tube so defiantly a problem there.

I was on Facebook reading about the Commodore C128, clicked back ( Instant freeze and driver crash )

 

[Neil79]

Think I'll be sticking with 350.12 until NVIDIA gets it's act together

 

[Neil79]

To those saying it's due to system instability or overclocking this is rubbish ( Even though I tried downclocking/stock ). This is clearly a widespread issue as Nvidia wouldn't come forward asking for everyones reports, you can see for yourself also that this isn't isolated to one persons computer, it's happening to lots of people.

There is a serious issue with the drivers of 353 and upwards, previous ones are perfect

None at all with the latest.
I run my TX at stock with no PX running or GPUZ and i dont have afterburner installed.
Had a couple of driver resets on the last drivers but only when GPUz was running.

Here's another point, many of the people complaining are using EVGA Precision and MSI Afterburner while in Chrome/Firefox. Driver -> MSI clash perhaps?

 

[Neil79]

I don't tend to run oc'ed for gaming regardless the gpu(s)-stability is king.

Do you use MSI or EVGA Precision or any form of graphical monitoring?

( Clutching at straws here )

 

[Neil79]

Hmmm interesting!

I can trigger it with EVGA Precision 4.2.1 when the polling time is set to < 4000ms. 4000ms sensor poll is pretty stable, I've had the odd TDR, but maybe 3 or 4 in the last week max. 3000ms gives TDR's pretty frequently. GPU is GTX780, reference model standard reference clocks. OS is Windows 7 SP1.

 

[Neil79]

Come on guys stay on topic, this isn't an AMD related thread

 

[Neil79]

350.12 is fine, it's any drivers after that where nVidia went full potato.

Yeh, lots of people are saying the 350s are very good. I will try them when I get back

 

[Neil79]

WHQL 353 is crashing occasionally as I play the Witcher 3. 352 was crashing as I used Chrome. I may go back to 350 as it's the last stable driver.

350.12 is 100% stable for me newer ones both crash ingame or on desktop. Will retry them without chrome if i get time as normally chrome lives open on my desktop

I held back installing based on feedback here but then couldn't stop wondering if I could improve performance in GTA so I went for the latest drivers.

They have been absolutely fine for me so far no crashes whatsoever in Chrome. I did have a display driver crash in GTA but found out is actually caused by MSI AB performance stat overlay or Fraps. Since that has been disabled no probs.

Another MSI AB + Nvidia issue?

 

[Neil79]

Weird how some are having no TDR events...

Guess I'm pro

I had none with a 560, none with a 660, none with a 970, none with a 980GTX until I used the 353.06 and 353.12

 

[Neil79]

nVidia are to blame here, end of.

 

[Neil79]

No problems here, 980 SLI on 353.06.

Currently overclocked to 1530 core too.

Using MSI Afterburner too? What OS

 

[Neil79]

Windows 8.1 x64.

Don't like MSI, I've got the clocks set in a custom bios and flashed it.
.

So far 95% of those with crashing are using MSI Afterburner and or EVGA Precision and the latest drivers

 

[Neil79]

Right I'm going to try one of the drivers that I previously had on my system that didn't crash which was the 353.00 however I am going to try the tweak mentioned by one of the MSI users and setting the monitoring to a polling rate of 4000 instead of 1000(Default)

 

[Neil79]

Right, I've two two browsers open, both hardware acceleration off, using 353.00, and polling rate set to 4000, lets have a test

 

[Neil79]

So far no driver has stopped responding with multiple browser windows open using 353.00 and an MSI Afterburner polling rate of 4000-5000 ( Over 2 hours )

 

[Neil79]

and another!

WOW thanks guys it was the drivers I when back to 350.12 and have been play Wicher 3 for the last two hours fine. Card boosting to 1610 with a +154 on the core.

Cheers guys.

 

[Neil79]

it's quite odd how cantankerous these recent drivers are and how it varies from machine which one works better.

For sure, thankfully it's not a minority report and Nvidia should be able to find out what's going on.

 

[Neil79]

Wonder if multi-monitor/120+Hz has any impact there as usually the 3D clocks and voltage behave a little differently due to the higher bandwidth requirements and tend to step up/down less abruptly I think - even my laptop has a 120Hz panel built in.

144hz monitor here