Game turns off than on with horrible fps

[Norack]

So my problem seems to be that after playing the game for about an hour or so my graphics card will turn off and back on (exactly like when the display driver stops working) but i never get a thing that pops up that says the display driver stooped working, everything looks the exact same on my desktop, because when the display driver stops working my desktop looks different, so i don't think that's what happened.

But again it looks just like the display driver on my GTX680 has malfunctioned as the whole screen will turn black, than come back up with me still in FFXIV. When it comes back up the game will be running at 5 fps. Where as before this happens I am running the game on max settings with 60+fps.

This problem also happens in the benchmark sometimes to. When I run the benchmark if the benchmark starts up right away it runs perfectly. But sometimes the screen will go black and come back up with the benchmark loading and it won't run good at all.

I am using a EVGA Nvidia GTX680 with driver version 9.18.13.1422.

Are the newer drivers fixed now? the only reason I don't update to them is because I kept hearing that it drastically decreases FFXIV's performance.

Edit--------

I first thought maybe its something my graphics card did? (maybe like a failsafe?) cause it was overheating. I checked it out and it was running at 59 degrees Celsius which from what I understand is a fairly good temp.

It's a pretty common Nvidia problem. I get it a lot too. It's the drivers and I'm pretty sure that the current beta and release drivers for Nvidia are not optimized for FF:ARR

If this is true, (which im thinking it is cause in order to fix the problem all i have to do is exit the game and than start it up again and its fixed). Does anyone know of a driver version that this would not happen with? Cause it gets kinda irritation having to exit FFXIV every hour and log back in. I mean it would be irritation normally with a normal game, but having to do it with a game that has all these server problems and 90k errors, its always nerve racking when i have to exit. Cause who knows if I will be able to get back in.

This is called a TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery). I was only getting the 36 hour TDR which is fixed with the latest nvidia beta drivers. People are also reporting a performance increase with the 326.80 drivers. I'd try them.

There is a workaround for general TDRs that requires an added registry key found in this Microsoft support article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2665946
As usual, follow all steps exactly and backup your registry before making changes.

hmm, the game does seem to freeze for about a second or two before the screen goes black and than comes back. Guess I will just have to update my drivers and hope for the best? and hope the drivers don't diminish my performance to much?