Video freezes, nvidia 8800GT, probable driver issue

DarkShadowSwE So it seems to mainly concern steam games , might be something with theri graphic motor that intefer , anyone had any game besides a steam game crash ?

SUSPICIOUS THINGS IN MY PROBLEM

8800GTLEFT FOR DEAD 2WINDOWS 7 64 BIT ENTERPRISE

I am seeing these three things strongly associated with this problem.

My Error specifically

Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered. Error 4101.

The screen jerks several times, and sometimes crashes the game, sometimes it does not. The error log always says that same error.

****Premise:

Ok, a week or so ago Nvidia released the new 196.75 driver, then recalled it because it was killing video cards (limiting fan speed and overheating).  It killed my 9800GT.  I HAD a 9800GT and 8800GT in SLI (DID have two 8800GTs, one died and got replaced with 9800GT).  Since the 9800GT died I took it out and put the 8800GT in the main slot and kept using the faulty driver (at the time I didn't know).  Used the driver for a few days until I found out it was killing cards.  Reverted to 196.21 and now LFD2 crashes on average every 30 mins.  Sometimes 20, sometimes an hr, but generally at least once every 30 mins.

Rig:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz 6MB L2 Cach

EVGA 132-CK-NF78-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI

OCZ 780 Watt

Reaper HPC Edition 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRA

XFX 8800GT Alpha Dog Edition

All the solutions I have tried do not work and people say my card may be bad.

I have tried several previous nvidia drivers

Disabling Windows Aero

Setting my max CPU cores to 2

Changing in game settings to all low settings

I have also read that later Nvidia drivers have fixed this problem, and all the forums I read are back before Win7 was released, which is also odd that I am having this problem now.  It looks like it's pointing to the Source engine from LFD2, the 8800GT, Nvidia, and Win7.  These are common points.

My 3D stereoscopic is off, I just tried disabling the service, I will see if this works...

Another affected user here, sadly I have less to add, except that, although there are a few lucky people who are not facing this issue, most of us do. I have been hands-on 2 friends' computers, one with the exact same hardware as mine (XFX 8800 GTS on Win7 Ultimate x64... except for the fact that myKingston RAM is Hyper-X and his is not) and the other one with better and newer hardware (260GTX on Win7 Ultimate x86). Asus Striker Extreme motherboards for first 2 machines, Striker Extreme II in the newest. More than enough cooling, machines clean inside (physically and logically), and still the symptoms are there and vary on each machine.

As per me, I do get the computer freezes, the horizontal lines all around, and the eventual blackouts and driver restarts, as much as some BSOD's featuring fancy crash-dumps. I do know this one would clearly and commonly point out to a hw issue, but it is not. When I first installed Win7 on my box (the exact same day it was released) and got the nVidia drivers that were currently in Windows Update, everything was just fine (I needed to manually install the PhysX drivers from the nVidia home page, but besides that everything worked perfect). Smooth. I was delighted with Windows 7. One day I'm still regretting, I decided to take a look at those video enhancements that nVidia promised in their new WHQL'd drivers. Some time after installing them, I started getting those horizontal lines on the screen, and since then everything has been worse all the time. What I've tried to do:

• update to latest BIOS - useless
• try several nVidia BETA and WHQL'd drivers - useless
• physically cleaned up the inside of my box, re-seated video card and RAM - useless
• reinstalled Win7, tried the Windows Update drivers (currently the 18x.dunno version). Installed NOTHING else at all (video codecs, media players, games...). Started browsing some files to move them to a different partition - there! horizontal lines everywhere, screen blackout... back once again.
• removed nVidia drivers. Removed the nVidia drivers installed automatically by Windows Update after rebooting. Disabled Windows Update services and rebooted again - performed smooth and perfect for DAYS. No 3D accelleration at all, no cool Aero visual effects... and also no lines, no blackouts, no crashes. Even played the games I was able to try without accelleration (e.g Plants vs. Zombies, and an old Heroes of Might and Magic version), watched videos, downloaded stuff, opened countless browser windows (Chrome, Firefox, IE...), countless windows at a time just for testint, and NOTHING ever crashed.

Call me crazy, but I think it all clearly points out to a driver issue, happening ever since nVidia deployed some kind of "video enhancement" that just kills something in the Windows 7 kernel, especially (but not only) in x64 editions. As per me, the next (and hopefully last) troubleshooting step I'll perform is to kiss DirectX10 goodbye, backup everything I want to keep, and roll back to my old Windows XP Pro SP3 x86. I'm not really in the mud for doing it now, as I'm a bit fed up with this issue and everything involving my computer right now, but I'll let you know as soon as I do and check for a few days. In the meantime, let's hope for nVidia to release a stable version of their drivers, so we can use all the so announced features we've paid for.

... and, right before going back to XP Pro SP3, I found the solution. It worked for me, I hope it works for everyone: try and disable Aero. I did this by chance yesterday, after installing the latest nVidia beta drivers (257.15) with the same results as always. I noticed that the lines on the screen and the blackouts appeared more quickly and more often when I had more windows opened, or tried to display the start menu, etc, so I just decided to try and disable Aero. The results were instant: the lines disappeared from my screen, and I was playing Left for Dead and Trine for about half an hour total with no problem at all. Moreover, the default video settings for both games were higher than they used to (which can be quite logical, by the way, but makes Aero a really bad bet for gamers). Concretely, the Trine defaults were the highest available (anisotropic 8, antialiasing 4x, very high video quality), while they used to be the half with Aero on (anisotropic 4, antialiasing 2x, also very high video quality). I also tried to open countless windows at the same time, including 3 media players (WinAmp, VLC and Win Media Player), switched from one to another with no problem at all... perfect. I even got to guess it might have been caused by some kinf of corruption in my custom Aero theme, so I tried to enable a Windows 7 default Aero theme - as soon as I did it, the lines were there again, and it did cost me another driver crash to be able to swith Aero off again. Right now, I'm running the latest 19x.xx WHQL'd driver version, and my computer is, once again, perfectly stable.

So, to sum up, issue solved for me, I hope it helps somebody else too... and, if you take a look at this thread, other people have solved it by disabling some of the Windows UI visual enhancements. To me, it still looks (and it will always look) as a driver issue. The reasons seem obvious to me:

• I have been running Windows 7 with Aero on using an older driver (in fact, the one included in my Windows 7 CD)
• you can have Aero on with (e.g) an ATI card.
• Aero does work with other cards and in other environments, and causes no crashes at all so, in this particular case, it's nVidia who has to meet the Microsoft standards in order to provide their customers with a good experience when running Windows 7.

It's also a curious fact that many people has other symptoms, and even a few have no problem at all, with can mislead to hardware issues (I did think of it myself, too) and such. However, there's a quite reasonable explaination for that: no matter if you are running a 8800GTS (as I am), a 8800GT, a GTX260, a 9800GT (to mention some of the top-sellers and thus top affected cards), the driver you will be installing is THE SAME. It's even the same for Vista and for 7 (althought I quess that the driver bundle will install some different libraries depending on the OS and maybe the GPU). Take a look at the list of supported products:http://www.nvidia.es/object/win7_winvista_64bit_197.45_whql_es.html. However, the GPU's are not the same, and the card builds (not the chipset) even vary depending on the manufacturer (XFX, Sparkle, ASUS...), so the symptoms don't have to be exactly the same if it is caused by a driver issue.

I also agree with some versions I've read over the internet, that this can cause the card to get fried (this is where the manufacturers play their role: if a driver forces a graphics card, causing it to overheat, and it is not properly cooled... g'bye, graphics card). Some people, after installing the driver, started to see artifacts on the screen, even in the initial RAM count screen, in the BIOS, etc. This is, when the driver has not even loaded. I don't know what is nVidia doing with their drivers, but they are surely loosing their customers' trust... while ATI continues releasing great-looking and great-performing cards. I'd say they really need to focus on this one, and stop announcing that their new drivers make this game look 4% better, the other one 6% better... if I cannot even run my OS crash-free, how can I enjoy a game experience?

My problem was a bit different but has been fixed now by updating the buggy Seagate disk firmware (cache bug.)

Yours is puzzling, maybe check the Asus forums to see if there could be some incompatibilities between the motherboard and the graphic adapter, this happened on at least one of the Asus models. It seems to be related to the 3D acceleration circuit, according to several previous posts. At this stage, you might want to contact the manufacturer for a refund or replacement, since you've done pretty much everything by the book and wasted enough time already on the problem.