"Display driver stopped responding and has recovered"

I just built a new PC, and was testing out Crysis Warhead on it. After about 10 minutes the screen went blank, and it dumped me to desktop with the error “Display driver stopped responding”. I noticed some textures were really low res on distant rocks before this occurred. Also, I had been using this 9800GT in my previous PC with no incident.

What causes this error?

My system:

Intel Core i5 Quad 750 2.66Ghz
GeForce 9800 GT 512 meg
Win7 64 bit
4 gig RAM
650W 12v rail PSU

Overheating plausible. Update your drivers, or roll back to previous drivers if you’re already up to date.

Get a temp monitor.

I did grab the latest NVidia 64 bit Win7 drivers.

Is there a good resource to find what the latest previous driver set was?

Also, what is a good temperature monitor?

Try disabling Aero. If that doesn’t work, try removing all traces of other graphics drivers from your system. If that doesn’t work, this problem can be caused by software conflicts, so try stopping any programs, especially things that load in at bootup (this fixed the problem on my machine; I think it was some HP printer software that caused the problem).

This is a clean install of windows 7 (I just finished this box). The only things I’ve installed are Firefox, the latest Nvidia drivers, Flash Player and Steam (which I need to have running to play Crysis Warhead).

Is Aero known to cause this problem on high-end systems like mine? How do I disable it?

Not sure, check out nVidia temp monitor Google search or something.

Dunno with 7, but in Vista you would select the “Windows Vista Basic” color scheme rather than "Windows Aero"in the Appearance panel.

Unfortunately there seem to be a myriad of causes for this both with NVidia and ATI drivers.

Also, if you are overclocking the graphics card, try disabling that and see what happens.

Ah I figured out how to disable Aero. Disabled it and-

now Crysis Warhead just crashes to desktop after loading loading a game between the 10-60% mark. Fantastic.

So, who knows what is wrong with this system.

Ugh I finally decide to get back into PC gaming again after 6 years of being blessed with the ease of use of consoles, and of course this happens.

I think you have a driver problem, then.

Hmmm… I recently had the driver failure problem as well… which soon led into outright video card failure. Since this is a recently put together machine, you might want to try taking out and putting the video card bag in in case a connection is loose.

As for monitoring video cards, I use EvGA precision and it makes it really easy to do (and manually set fan speeds). It should still work with a non-EVGA nVidia card, though I’m not positive on that.

Ok, I reverted back from 197.57 to 197.13. Same problem… the game crashes at the 80% of loading a level.

I do notice a small audio pop when it hits this percentage. I’m using onboard sound on an ASUS motherboard. Could it be an onboard sound problem?

Also, would it matter what PCI-E slot the card is in? I have two on my MB…

Aero shouldn’t be a problem. Anyone that has to disable aero for stable operation probably has broken hardware.

To me, it sounds like it’s overheating. I had a scare with my 4850 doing the same last week. Was able to resolve the issue by cleaning all the dust off the card and making sure no fans were being obstructed. Dropped the temp by 10 degrees centigrade while idle, 30 degrees under load.

You should be able to monitor temps with GPU-z. Load it up and try running furrmark in a window in stability mode. It’ll stress the GPU and give you an idea of how hot it is under load. If that doesn’t appear to be a problem, you might also want to run memtest to make sure you don’t have a flaky stick of RAM. That can cause hard to diagnose stability issues.

This happened to me once. Turned out to be because of not using the installation disc that came with the videocard. I don’t know if they’d modified the generic nVidia drivers, but either way, uninstalling what I got from nVidia, doing a driverclean, then installing from the bundle disc fixed the problem.

Ah hah… that might actually have something to do with it.

I built this PC at work, and used an old Nvidia board I had lying around to make sure it worked. I got home and installed the newer Nvidia drivers onto the box…

How do I do a “driverclean”?

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=745

Ok, I installed my video card in the other PCI-E slot on my board.

I booted up Win7, and it started at a really low resolution and had to recognize the video card and install it’s internal drivers. I then installed 197.13, and booted up Crysis Warhead. It loaded up and let me play for about 15 minutes, then then the screen went black and it froze. I ctrl-alt-deleted, and I had a dialog that said Crysis Warhead had crashed.

I loaded up GPU-Z, then played Settlers 7 for about 10 minutes. My GPU hit 57 degrees… which seems fine, right?

Also, it looks like DriverClean is only for XP… it doesn’t mention Vista or Win7?

Hrm… yeah that seems fine.

Your problem might be that you’re playing Crysis when you should be playing Settlers 7 :)

So what else is there then? Bad RAM?

Is there a way to test RAM integrity without creating a boot disc? I don’t have any CDs lying around that would allow me to make one…

I assume you’ve tried the basics of re-seating the ram and re-plugging any power connectors to the card, right?

At this point, it’s probably easier to borrow/buy a new video card to test out. Pick a card up from a place that will let you return an open box.