A series of unfortunate events

#1 - Aug. 19, 2014, 7:38 a.m.

So, I’ve only had this new gaming desktop for about a month. It uses an i5-4670k with a Nvidia 760, so the specs should cover the game well.

Trouble is, I’m not able to play Guild Wars 2 consistently. A play session will be fine for the most part. Good frame rate and everything, but then I’ll get stutter-spikes with an annoying bleeping sound. In the worst-case scenario, that happens and then turns into a full freeze that black screens the game, but not the pc. This may recover and allow me to continue the session or it may put the client into a not-responding state. It then may or may not give me a message that says something along the lines of “Nvidia driver kernel has stopped working and has recovered.”

Fixing it has proved to be remarkably difficult. I’ve tried reducing the graphics settings for the game, but there doesn’t seem to be a correlation. I’ve tried clean-wiping my drivers and reinstalling the newest one. I’ve tried opening my computer up and airing out the dust; there wasn’t much. I’ve tried virus scans, junkware scans, and malware scans.

As of this moment, nothing has worked. Help would be appreciated.

#3 - Aug. 19, 2014, 2:27 p.m.

Hey there,

From the error you’ve reported it appears as though you have what’s known as the TDR bug. As outined on Nvidia forums (https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/389688/geforce-drivers/nvidia-statement-on-tdr-errors-display-driver-nvlddmkm-stopped-/) there is no known single cause of this issue. The common causes are failing power supply, failing video card, corrupt Windows, corrupt drivers and even just simple overheating. Technically speaking, this is an issue Nvidia needs to solve because it’s their TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) system that is crashing the driver. In essence, something is crashing the video driver and instead of locking the entire PC and forcing a reboot, the drivers now crash, you get that error message and they reset, keeping you in Windows. Specifically from that forum post:

How does TDR work? Timeout Detection and Recovery

Windows Vista and later operating systems attempt to detect situations in which computers appear to be completely “frozen”. They then attempt to dynamically recover from the frozen situations so that their desktops are responsive again. This process of detection and recovery is known as timeout detection and recovery (TDR).

Common issues that can cause a TDR:

Incorrect memory timings or voltages
Insufficient/problematic PSU
Corrupt driver install
Overheating
Unstable overclocks (GPU or CPU)
Incorrect MB voltages (generally NB/SB)
Faulty graphics card
A badly written driver or piece of software, but this is an unlikely cause in most cases
Driver conflicts
Another possibility that people tend not to like to hear, is that you are simply asking too much of your graphics card. What I mean by this, is that if you have your settings too high and the graphics card struggles and falls to very low FPS, then something graphically complex occurs, the GPU may not be able to respond and a TDR error may occur. There are no categoric fixes but some users have found that changing the power management mode to ‘Prefer Maximum Performance’ has helped.