Fix for "A DirectX error has occured" crash

If you check prior posts here you'll see I was one of the ones getting crashes with DirectX errors. I'm using an NVidia card (560Ti 448 Cores) and driver version 355.98 was 99% stable. Every driver past that far less so. At the time being stuck at 355.98 was the only solution for me.

I've since resolved it. I downloaded MSI Afterburner and checked my video card's clock speeds. The card was factory overclocked, so I knocked it down to the reference clock speeds (Core Clock and Memory Clock) off NVidia's homepage. Still crashed. I then underclocked it by a full 10%. Drastic, but I wanted to see if it would help at all. It did. I ran stable with the latest driver at the time for a full day, the same driver that would usually crash out within an hour without fail.

So I experimented and raised the clocks up to only 5% under the reference speed. This seemed to be the sweet spot for me. I've run it for three weeks now, currently using 375.63. I had only one incident. The video locked up for a moment, it looked like it was going to crash, then a couple seconds later recovered. That's it. Just the one momentary lock, no crashes. My card is still running at 95% and that's more then enough for me.

Why does 355.98 and earlier work 99% fine? I don't know for sure. I read that Microsoft added some sort of feature that measures micro-failures in the card and forces a driver reboot if there are too many of them. Perhaps this is what is happening, but only drivers past 355.98 enabled that feature?

So, if you're running into this I suggest nabbing MSI Afterburner and testing lower clock speeds, whether back to default if overclocked, or even underclocking slightly. This issue was driving me crazy and I didn't want to stay with 355.98 forever.

I hope this helps those of you out there suffering this same issue.