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Video driver rebooting

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Ohoni.6057
#1 - Sept. 18, 2014, 9:12 p.m.
Blizzard Post

I’ve been playing on this rig since launch, and have not experienced this issue before or made any significant changes to it, but over the past week or so, the game has been rebooting my video driver about once per day or so. When this happens, both monitors go black (I have dual) for about 3-6 seconds or so, and then come right back up. The game continues playing, everything else is fine, and then a little popup in the corner tells me that my video card has rebooted. Hardly the end of the world in most cases, but rather worrying if this continues.

I have a Geforce GTX 550Ti, running on Windows 7, and this problem only occurs while GW2 is running, and only during the past week or so.

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Ashley Segovia
#5 - Sept. 19, 2014, 8:30 p.m.
Blizzard Post

This sounds to me like the “TDR bug” given the description. You can find more info about this on Nvidia’s forums as they do have an official statement regarding the issue.

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

There are no categoric fixes but some users have found that changing the power management mode to ‘Prefer Maximum Performance’ has helped.