Vista - The Driver has stopped Working and Successfully Recovered

hey, i was playing Crysis and i can play it for about 3-4 mins then the screen goes black for 5 secs or so and then it exits the game, and i have to start the game again and then the problem occurs again,

The Display Driver has stopped Working and has Successfully Recovered

i've tried updating all the drivers and i still get the same problem , i got a BFG Geforce 9600 GT OC 512mb graphic card, does anyone know what the problem is and how i can fix it,

i think it might be the Power supply, and that the graphic card is not getting enough power to run, is that the case or should i be looking somewhere else ?

has any1 else had this problem aswell ? , if so i'd like to see some responses.


Benzmann.
A+ IT Technician
MCTS - Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist

The dreaded "Display driver has stopped responding and has recovered" issue. This issue seems to be tied to Vista by the way of Microsoft's "Timeout Detection and Recovery of GPUs through WDDM"

In short, if an application takes to long to execute a task, a timeout occurs and thus your lovely "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" error. Unfortunately there is no one fix to this, and just about anything can cause it.

For me, my issue went away when I switched video cards. I had a 3870 that was overheating and had to be RMA'd. While awaiting my replacement, I decided to purchase an ATI 4850 - the surprise is that the display stopped responding error has been completely eliminated on my system.

Am I suggesting you replace your video card? No. There are various opinions on the cause(s) and solution(s) to the problem, and unfortunately while some fixes may work for some, they're not always universal, even with similar hardware.

The few common suggestions would be to:
- Update video driver
- Turn down overclocks – GPU/CPU
- Patch games
- Check for overheating – case, GPU, CPU
- Check that the video card isn't faulty

Note that this problem is an equal opportunist as it affects both ATI & Nvidia. A Google will show more hits with Nvidia, but ATI is there as well.

Here's a couple of threads I started at Rage3D (ATI fan base)

“Display driver stopped responding and has recovered” - Rage3D Discussion Area
Please Fix! - Display Driver stopped responding Issue - Rage3D Discussion Area

Hope this infor helps in finding a solution for you.

thx for replying, but can u tell me how i can "downclock" the GPU, i got the Graphic card in retail overclocked, where should i be looking to lower it ?

Hi Benzmann
I think he means any overclocking you have done. If not apologies Sygnus.

I used to get this problem all the time and tried all sorts of suggestions from forums to get rid of it but nothing seemed to help.

But then it suddenly went away.

This coincided with me getting SP1 for Vista and getting the latest drivers from Nvidia so I'm not sure which or both fixed it. Since then I have updated drivers constantly and had no problems.

Give that a try if you haven't already. There's a driver thread on the Graphics Card page.

It'd help folks help you if you filled out your system spec. Hope you get it sorted.

best wishes, John

If you're not overclocking, then I would advise against "downclocking" as that would just create more problems for you. If you are overclocking, then I would just set everyting back to "default settings"

Also be advised that since you've not listed your system specs everything is a guess on my part, and not really helpful to you.

System specs won't guarantee a fix, but they will guarantee more appropriate suggestions/solutions, greater participation, and "less guesswork"

Thanks.

@ johnwillyums, that's exactly what I meant. Thanks.

my system specs are:

Graphic Card: BFG Geforce 9600 GT OC 512mb
RAM: 4GB
CPU: Pentium 4 3.13 Ghz
Motherboard: ECS 945P-A v1.1
Power Supply: 350w


and i am not overclocking btw


i think the problem might be the Power supply, since i need a minimum 400W Power supply for the graphic card , what do u guys think about that, could that be the point of my problem ?

Just re-read this...

You're card was "tweaked" (OverClocked) from the original reference card supplied by Nvidia to BFG, thus BFG's "OC" designation. However since the card is manufactured and sold in that tweaked condition, it is considered to be within normal operating conditions by BFG. Now if "you" overclocked the card from BFG's norm, then the card would be considered overclocked. If you have not overclocked the card, then downclocking is unnecessary.

Hope this clearifies things a bit

yep, but what can i do to make these problems go away ? so i can continue on playing games

I just looked up your video card and it's not really that much better than an 8800 GT so don't expect much out of it in the way of Crysis.

Yeah, that "could" be causing problems. I would recommend a 450-550 for that system. If you look at my system specs, I'm running a 550 so I wouldn't recommend anything higher then that for you. BFG recommends a 425 watt so...

BFG Tech - BFG NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT OC 512MB PCIe 2.0 (under "Detailed Specs)


Got you on the no overclocks.

i was thinking about 650-700W, since i got lots of extra stuff in the PC, would that matter or would it be better, incase i would install something more, like go for SLI

here is the power supply i was thinking of
Tæknibær ehf

scroll down abit and then u will see the english version hehe, the above is icelandic