Freeze Screen Issues

[Marishi-Ten]

I am having the same issue, though I tend to only freeze up/have a black screen for 5-10 seconds at most.

From checking around the internet this seems to be a problem affecting Nvidida cards and is believed to be the driver crashing and recovering.

Has anyone had this happen on an AMD card?

For reference I have a Gigabyte GTX 780 GHZ edition in a rig that is less than 1 month old. (4770K based, mild OC to 4.0GHz)

The max temp my card hits (using OHM to see peak temps) is right at 50c. So overheating is not an issue.

I can play Dayz, a game that pushes the temps pretty high, for over 5 hours with no problem. I've also ran Valley in a loop for just over 2 hours and used OCCT to error check my card. CPU and mem are both fine as well as I've ran a full memtest (4 passes) and ran Prime95 over night to test the CPU stability.

Even ran Prime and Valley together for an hour to check temps with both under load with zero issues.

PSU is new (80+ gold and well over wattage and 12v rail requirements for system/GPU) and my mobo's BIOS is flashed up to the current version.

Drivers are current with the previous drivers having been scrubbed in safe mode before installing the latest. I also tested the beta (then scrubbed and re-installed the current) but I seemed to get freezes/driver crashes more. (3 in less than 15 mins vs. 1 maybe every hour or so in non-beta)

I play on Maximum, but have gotten the freeze/blackscreen even with lowered settings.

This is the only game I have any sort of issue with.

Do the panic logs show any specific .dll/.exe causing the crash? With a full driver crash, your monitor will flicker out while the driver attempts to reboot and reload the card. It must not be getting that bad for your GPU.

Pull the panic logs and try to find a commonality in them. Ideally, all the separate instances will point to a specific .dll/.exe/.rb/.gz/.sh/.plist/etc. causing the crash.

[5xad0w]

^^

Well, first off, I did a clean install of Win 8 to rule out any other program conflicts causing this. Namely any rogue driver files floating around. (i've had both AMD and Nvidia drivers on this rig as well as remote access apps that install their own display drivers)

With Win 8 fully patched up (but not updated to 8.1) and nothing else aside from Nvidia's latest drivers and FFXIV I still got the "goes black with sound, then comes back about 5 seconds later" issue 4 times in 2 play sessions.

In event viewer it's tagged as Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered. which certainly fits the profile of what I and some others are seeing. At least those of us who aren't straight up crashing or hard locking.

I've also tried (before the fresh install) running the game in windowed mode and borderless windowed mode instead of fullscreen. No change.

As well I tried a registry fix that extends the time before windows tries to recover the video driver (in case of a false positive from the card switching power states) but this resulted in DX errors straight to desktop instead.

Going to follow the nvlddmkm line a bit and see if I find anything.

[5xad0w]

Ok. I've been going at this for a while now and MAY have found a fix. I want to test it a couple times before I jump to conclusions.

Firstly, I found a 100% way for me to reproduce the error by watching a certain movie from the Inn Room.

"Way Down the Hole" Cutscene #3 will always result in the "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." error for me at the end of the scene as it transitions back into the room. It may work with other cutscenes, but I wanted to stick with what I knew would work 100%.

I've tried various fixes, even ones that seemed absurd or highly unlikely, and have always had the error crop up every single time. Of note was a PCI-E state fix from power management that actually resulted in heavy artifacting with my card. Had to stop testing to run OCCT for 2 hours and then run a burn test with FurMark to make sure I didn't damage my card. (others have reported artifacts along with lock ups, so it still seems to be driver based)

Anyway, I've since ran the cutscene I mentioned twice in a row, with a reboot between each, with no problem. This is the first time, including when it originally played in game, that it has not triggered an error.

This is the (mind numbingly simply) fix for it:

http://www.tinkertry.com/display-dri...ed-responding/

It does seem that the core problem is windows thinking that a change in the power state of the GPU is actually the card becoming unresponsive. The end result being that windows creates a very real error (in the form of prematurely resetting the graphics driver) in response to a problem that doesn't exist.

I'm going to go run the cutscene a couple more time then go out and actually run around the world and see if I can stay error free for at least an hour but wanted to post what has been the most promising fix so far for others to try.

[5xad0w]

Ok. After a while I started to get the black screen error again.

I did however have better luck with the regedit method now that I have a fresh copy of DX installed. (no longer crashes out)

Here is a link to how to do it:

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-...ore-it-resets/

Of note, if you are running a 64bit version of Windows, use QWORD where it specifies DWORD.

I seem to be stable (need more real time testing) using just this with the power state set back to Adaptive in Nvidai control. (no conflict in using both, but i want to nail down an exact solution)

What this does is change the time Windows waits before trying to recover a driver it assumes has hung/crashed. (default is 2 seconds i think, though there doesn't appear to be an initial reg entry)

10 seconds seems to be enough time for me, but people locking up for a long time may need to extend that window.

You can disable it (via a separate registry entry) however that would stop your video driver from recovering when you DO have a legitimate error and likely leave you in a hard reset situation.

If for some reason you get crashes now with a DirectX message where you used to get freezing/black screens you may need to re-install your main version of DX as well as 9.0c.

Hopefully this does it.