Display Driver Has Crashed and Successfully Recovered

[Celeste]

Hey all, another silly software/hardware question from yours truly! This one is a really bugger. I play Final Fantasy XI Online in 800x600 Windowed mode. The game will crash often enough. I get the error message, "nVidia kernal mode display driver has crashed and recovered successfully". Often times it simply locks up the screen and I have to manually shut the computer off at the switch to be able to use the computer again.

I don't think it's healthy for me to be restarting the computer as I am when it locks up. It's also no fun for me when the game crashes and the people I'm doing crap with consider replacing me with someone whose game doesn't crash often. I was looking at this support article here. I'm not too keen on messing around with the registry, so, if someone else has experienced the headache I'm enjoying right now, could you share how you worked it out so I can get back to playing FFXI crash-free?

FOR THE RECORD:

I am running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit Edition. I have an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.26 Ghz processor, I has 4 GB of RAM, and an nVidia 9800M GTS 1GB video card. HALP, OH PLEASE, HALP ME.

[Sonomaa]

sounds very much like your video card is shitting the bed

[Celeste]

You'd know quite a bit about shitting in bed, eh old man?

[Auspice]

My ATI card sometimes does this when I'm dual boxing, playing music, browsing the web, and watching movies. For me it was an overheating issue and I haven't had it happen in a while.

[hey]

Try updating your video drivers. In the likely case that doesn't fix the problem, then you've got a hardware problem, either the card needs to be replaced, or possibly overheating.

[Celeste]

Try updating your video drivers. In the likely case that doesn't fix the problem, then you've got a hardware problem, either the card needs to be replaced, or possibly overheating.

Yeah, it's been time for a new computer for a long time now. Trying to make this one last awhile longer though, y'know? I procured it in 2009. Worked well, up until some beta drivers sorta fucked my GPU up. No matter! I've been trying to give it more airflow in one way or another, and I didn't crash in the three hour period I've been playing. Thanks for the help, guys.

[hey]

If it's working fine after adjusting airflow, then that may be all it was. Just keep an eye on your temps (should be able to do so within the nvidia control panel), and make sure it doesn't get too hot. If you need to, you can always lower settings, or even underclock the gpu if you can't/don't want to buy an extra fan to help it out.

[Celeste]

If it's working fine after adjusting airflow, then that may be all it was. Just keep an eye on your temps (should be able to do so within the nvidia control panel), and make sure it doesn't get too hot. If you need to, you can always lower settings, or even underclock the gpu if you can't/don't want to buy an extra fan to help it out.

It's a laptop, would you propose one of those obnoxious cooler bases if such is the case?

[hey]

It's a laptop, would you propose one of those obnoxious cooler bases if such is the case?

Couldn't hurt. Depending on what you get, and your laptop, it may or may not help much, but it'll definitely help.

You can also try undervolting the cpu/gpu. Doing so can potentially lower temps by 10-20c if you're lucky, and unless you are overclocking, it doesn't affect performance at all. Obviously the gpu will especially make a difference, but since a laptop has everything so close together with hardly any airflow, lowering your cpu temps will also help quite a bit.

[Celeste]

How would I go about underpowering my GPU/CPU in my laptop?

[hey]

Check your bios, but depending on manufacturer, there may not be an option. If not, try rivatuner for gpu, and RMclock for the cpu. If those don't work, try googling around.

Once you find a way to lower the voltages, you can either lower it a little bit at a time repeatedly until you crash instantly, then raise it a bit, and test it to see if it is stable. Or you can go the slower, but safer route, and only lower it a little at a time, with a quick test between each step, until you get errors. In either case, you'll want to do a long test afterwards to make sure everything is stable and doesn't crash (prime95 for cpu. and you should be able to test your gpu with a bitcoin miner, or folding@home, or something similar). It's safe to go with the first option, at least for undervolting. If you set it too low, you'll either crash it, or get all kinds of errors preventing you from using it until you restart it, but otherwise it shouldn't do any permanent damage (again, only applies to underclocking, don't ever try that with overclocking). It'll take some time to get everything down while keeping it stable, but once you've got everythin set right, it works great.

[Aylee]

Use to have this problem a lot with my ATI card in my alineware. Would be in middle of a party or something and screen would just go black, return to desktop, and give me message saying htat video card has crashed and recovered (erroring ffxi). Turned out to me a heating issue. I bought a cooling pad and it helped a little but not much.

[Landsoul]

I have it sometimes I have 2 monitors and sometimes when I'm playing FFXI and watching a flash video on my otherscreen I get a crash, but too lazy to figure out what the problem is I don't really get it alot for me to worry.