Driver Has Stopped Responding - Nvidia Driver Crashes

StrongSad · 7 Jun 2015 at 18:36

Jono8 said:
Its definitely a power related issue in my opinion. I was having issues in Witcher 3 where it would often crash (driver crash) right after exiting the menu or inventory (ie when the cards power use goes from about 2% to 90%). Taking off the fps limiter ( setting to unlimited in the game) and setting "prefer maximum performance" in NVidia control panel for the power settings has fixed it.

I think there must be some sort of delay either in the drivers or the game that means for a millisecond of time the voltage has not increased to the correct amount for the core clock. I bet that is why crashes are happening in windows as well, something spikes the usage and the power delivery has not kept up.

I will add though that I fixed any driver crashes in internet browsers by COMPLETELY uninstalling any trace of the Nvidia drivers programs and features in Windows rather than the Nvidia installer tool. Just using the installer to overwrite the old driver seems to cause issues recently.

There is an issue with power and the drivers on some cards.

I have been having issues for months with my card (many others, noy just me) with both Elite and GTA with D3D crashes.

I have now resolved it for me by not allowing the voltage to drop below 1 volt when the card goes from hi to low to hi. I applyed that last Sunday and I have not had a crash since then.

The only way to get stability before that was to down clock the card to near reference clock speeds.

Most of those affected had factory clocked cards.

Neil79 · 7 Jun 2015 at 18:46

Rroff said:
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

Jono8 · 7 Jun 2015 at 18:53

Strudders said:
There is an issue with power and the drivers on some cards.

I have been having issues for months with my card (many others, noy just me) with both Elite and GTA with D3D crashes.

I have now resolved it for me by not allowing the voltage to drop below 1 volt when the card goes from hi to low to hi. I applyed that last Sunday and I have not had a crash since then.

The only way to get stability before that was to down clock the card to near reference clock speeds.

Most of those affected had factory clocked cards.

Indeed. I think the overclocks are stable as it will play a game all day if pegged at 99% usage but it is the adaptive power causing issues. I think the voltage regulator doesn't keep up for some reason.

Silent_Scone · 7 Jun 2015 at 19:00

To be honest there have been power balancing issues with Maxwell since GM204 launched. This is why for gaming I do not overclock my TITAN's.

rossiboy001 · 7 Jun 2015 at 19:08

A few of us using Nvidia cards have had this problem in iracing some much that we have given up with nvidia cards and gone AMD which has been the only way to resolve the problem. Between all of us we have tried different drivers, we have different cards, and all sorts of combinations of hardware changes but we have this common problem, with the same nvidia DLL file in crash reports

Neil79 · 7 Jun 2015 at 19:47

Right, I've had my browser up and running with plenty of usage since 3pm (353.00), that's nearly 5 hours without a driver has stopped responding. The latest drivers would give me one every 10mins..

Now on to The Witcher 3

Silent_Scone · 7 Jun 2015 at 19:50

Makes sense, polling period is how often the card is checked for shifts in clock speeds. What did you change it to out of interest?

Neil79 · 7 Jun 2015 at 19:51

Silent_Scone said:
Makes sense, polling period is how often the card is checked for shifts in clock speeds. What did you change it to out of interest?

It was on 500-1000, it's now on 5000

Silent_Scone · 7 Jun 2015 at 19:52

Oh. Hmm

Neil79 · 7 Jun 2015 at 19:54

What did you think I changed to ?

Silent_Scone · 7 Jun 2015 at 19:56

Nothing I just would have thought lower would have been better, but if it works it works!

I've reinstalled PX to see if it makes any difference for the worse. Out of morbid curiosity, 352.86 has been fine thus far.

Release · 7 Jun 2015 at 20:11

I had this issue on the latest drivers. Screen would go black, flash and the error would appear "drivers have stopped responding etc". Took two hours to Roll back to my 2014 drivers that came with my 970 and things are once again ok.

Thanks Nvidia

Ayahuasca · 7 Jun 2015 at 20:14

Release said:
I had this issue on the latest drivers. Screen would go black, flash and the error would appear "drivers have stopped responding etc". Took two hours to Roll back to my 2014 drivers that came with my 970 and things are once again ok.

Thanks Nvidia

Or just use the 350.12 drivers from their website?

Don't know why you're using 970 release drivers lol.

Neil79 · 7 Jun 2015 at 20:17

So far so good in the Witcher 3, running sweet as a nut with great frame rates

Silent_Scone · 7 Jun 2015 at 20:46

45 minutes of Witcher 3 and no issues with PX installed on 352.86

Neil79 said:
So far so good in the Witcher 3, running sweet as a nut with great frame rates

Mind uploading your DXdiag? Be interested to see as I can't get Witcher 3 v1.05 working with 353.06 well at all. Also noticed that no matter the driver or SLI bit used, Scaling past 2 cards is poor.

Neil79 · 7 Jun 2015 at 20:55

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=02581221908536439035

The Witcher 3 still running really well, 353.00 VSYNC OFF in game - Full Screen - Unlimited Frame Rates - MSI Afterburner capped 70FPS - 5000-6000 polling Rate in Monitoring

Here is the driver I'm using, I was originally to before I upgraded and all hell broke loose

DRIVER LINK

Silent_Scone · 7 Jun 2015 at 21:10

Oh ok, sorry I forgot there was a 353.00. That might explain things then. I'll give the hot fix driver a miss. if it's not broken don't fix it!

shankly1985 · 7 Jun 2015 at 21:13

Does msi afterburner polling rate effect performance?

Neil79 · 7 Jun 2015 at 21:14

Yeh everything was working perfectly, but in my rush to have the latest drivers I jumped for the 353.06 and 353.12 then everything went wrong. First all those driver had stopped responding problems, then the big game crash. Thought it was just my end and I saw a flood of issues on this forum and guru3D.

Hopefully, HOPEFULLY the polling rate of 5000-6000 on MSI and the 353.00's fix it

shankly1985 said:
Does msi afterburner polling rate effect performance?

See this -

You can also configure the polling rate, which is the amount of time MSI Afterburner should check your hardware to gather stats. I recommend leaving the polling settings alone, if you set those values really low you might actually hurt performance while playing games because MSI Afterburner is querying devices too often.

I've set a much higher polling rate because I don't want it constantly checking/updating, plus someone else mentioned it fixed their driver stopped responding issues

nashathedog · 7 Jun 2015 at 22:04

BluD said:
I get exactly the same thing with my ati cards with the same programs open as you. It only happens with the cards at or below stock speeds, as soon as i over clock them it wont do it any more.

I think chrome is just good at crashing the graphics drivers.

I'm on a 290x and Chrome and I haven't had an issue with that for as long as I can remember, I do not overclock my cpu or gpu though.