Thread: Nvidia Driver Failure

For reference, I use an EVGA GTX 560 2GB video card at stock clock (what the card came clocked as). I also have a Creative Xtreme Gamer sound card. Windows 7 off of a Patriot Wildfire. Core i5 2500k at stock clock.

I seem to be having this issue where the 295-296.10 drivers will spontaneously fail and put up a bunch of purple artifacts on my screen. After a second or two, the mouse will initialize and I can see my cursor moving, but I can't interact with the screen in any other way. Typically, this happens when I'm NOT playing games or stressing the card in any way. It usually happens when I try to switch windows while at the desktop, and most frequently happens when switching off from Netflix.

I have a tendency to clean out my event logs, and the most recent one wasn't logged by Windows for whatever reason, but from what I read, all it says is that the video driver has failed. Sometimes, the computer will automatically recover from it, and tell me that the video driver failed, but Windows recovered. Most of the time, the screen will stay with purple artifacts and never recover.

I have three prime suspects here: I'm using a faulty DVI cable to connect my monitor to the video card; I have a faulty monitor that is somehow messing up the drivers; or, I have a faulty video card. The odd thing is, this issue was present before I put a CLEAN installation of Windows 7 on the Solid State. When it was happening on my old mechanical drive, I kept going back in drivers until I found a stable one (but it killed performance in BF3, so I decided to just put up with it).

If it ever happens again, I'll see if I can get some hard info from the information logs. Otherwise, feel free to speculate/advise/troubleshoot.

Thanks,
Allane.

Is there a beta drive out there that you can try?

There's a new 300 series of beta drivers meant for the 680 series and down, so I'm going to give those a shot. The last stable drivers were the 285 series of drivers, but they have significant performance problems with Battlefield 3, and so I'm hesitant to use them.

Well...no BF3 or no computer...

Let me clarify that about 95% of the time, I don't have a problem with this. If it was an issue that was that urgent, you would have heard about it long before now. Since it doesn't happen during anything critical (A polite glitch, for once), I haven't really put it as top priority - I'm just getting annoyed by it now.

Although an extra note, the only time that it's "fatal" is when I'm switching away from Netflix. If I'm switching windows that DON'T involve Netflix, the driver usually recovers successfully. Maybe it has something to do with media players. Unfortunately, Netflix uses Silverlight, and Youtube uses Flash...

Think I'm having the same type of problem but I don't have any artifacts. I have a 460 GTX. There have been a couple times lately where the mouse will freeze and when it moves again the cursor will glide freely when you move the mouse (such as you bump the mouse and the cursor goes half way across the screen) but you can't click on anything. Although the keyboard doesn't seem to work either so I have to hard reset my comp.

I was having similar problems tabbing out of netflix with the 296.xx drivers, I am using the 300+ betas now and that problem went away ... in favor of new less intrusive problems.