This is one of those things I've had for I don't know how long, a year? Maybe more? And the internet is just full of people who have gone through a load of shenanigans, downloaded a load of crap and viruses, probably done more damage, trying fixes. The error appears when videos of any kind are playing on a site. But not all the time, just once every blue moon. Though you can certainly greatly increase the chance of it happening if you scroll through hundreds of gifs or look through YouTube hardcore. What happens is the screen will suddenly go black, then come back, with an error popping up pointing at the task bar saying: Display driver stopped responding and has recovered Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version XXX.XX (whichever version drivers I'm using) stopped responding and has successfully recovered. I've tried some obvious fixes (updating drivers, uninstalling with DDU and then installing latest drivers) and some straight forward ones (changing the power management mode to 'prefer maximum performance', turning off vsync) but it doesn't make a difference. In all this time it's only ever BSOD, frozen or crashed the computer once. And I've only had one game that would crash if it happened while I had it minimized. So it's not a big enough deal to go through hell and high water, and these things usually fix themselves... but months/years on, I figure it's worth putting in the effort to ask once here despite guessing it's gonna get 0 replies! I'm using 64-bit Windows 7 and my graphics card is a GTX 780.
Had it a few times after a driver update, only ever either gaming or watching YT but only in Firefox (before that seemed tp go with a FF update). Was going to switch back drivers but those were pre spectre/meltdown/nastiness updates nvidia did.
yes.... but I havent had one for a while now after my last attempt to fix it. I had the same issues on my gaming rig, especially when playing games. I was getting random BSODs, recovery of displays etc etc. Could not pin it down and like you spent many a night searching the web looking for a solution. I found one small post somewhere that suggested the refresh rate was an issue so I manually set the refresh rate in Nvidia control panel to 59hz and not to allow programs to change it to the default 60hz ( I use my 65 inch tv as my screen so crappy refresh rates but Witcher 3 in 65inch 4k goodness is to much to give up.. lol ) and I havent had it happen since. Might be worth a shot!
Someone elsewhere said it was from having gpu/hardware acceleration on in the browser settings, so I've tried that one first (I use Firefox). It sounds promising anyway. I'll try this one if that fails though.
It's caused by the GPU timing out although what's causing it to do that could be literally anything, even stuff not related to the GPU, trying to fix it is probably more hassle than it's worth so you could trying increasing the default timeout of two seconds but that's only really treating the symptom and not the cause.
When I had that error randomly, changing my PSU fixed it. I think the PSU was over 8 years old but I didn't know they had a "use-by date" until then.
Yup turning off the acceleration in the browser settings is what fixed it, all that time that's all it was. All those fixes involving power, NVIDIA settings, registry fiddling, and it was just a faulty browser setting that never got fixed.
