“Display driver stopped responding and has recovered” error.

I had this same problem and I was told by everyone to reinstall/update my graphics driver, and I even edited the time out settings (Which exacerbated the problem). That never worked. I was confused because my video card (radeon HD 7970) runs almost every game perfectly fine, but crashes only on less graphics intensive games (Like League of Legends).

The Solution? I download MSI afterburner and underclocked my graphics card. I switch to a much lower memory clock (about 2/3's less) and I haven't had another problem.

Nice try, but did nothing for me.  I have this issue every 30seconds

MOST SOLUTIONS IVE SEEN ONLINE SEEM TO REQUIRE USING REGEDIT, BUT I FIND THAT THIS IS UNNECESSARY (at least in my case)

Intro: I was having this issue on a recent build i put together, a full tower desktop running Windows 7 on a Intel i7 4770k, with a pair of nVidia GTX 760s from EVGA (gtx 760 FTW's). The OS is fully patched, and drivers are all up to date. The case itself is very well ventilated and cooled (the GPUs idle around 30C, the processor less than that), making the build generally very stable, even with a minor overclock, so you can imagine how concerned i was when my graphics card's kernel mode driver started crashing, frequently. (The answer is VERY). It did not start right away, so a few pieces of the puzzle are probably missing or placed incorrectly (ie I do not necessarily have all the relevant info below, or perhaps I am incorrectly explaining something). I did do a ton of research, searched around, asked on IRC and other tech help chats, and I have enough knowledge of hardware and software to make the educated guesses i do below. I could not find this solution or reasoning, with the nearest thing being a tip (a registry modification that delays how long windows waits for the driver) that I received from an nVidia online customer help chat, a tip that did not directly solve the issue, but did pushed me in the direction of a solution. I did some research, figured out what was going on for me after seeing similar things posted a few places, and did this.

Notes: This bug is not nVidia/driver specific, nor Office (2013) specific, nor is it Fraps specific (all three of things that had been terms of my previous searches, making it difficult to find a good solution).  I do, on the other hand. believe that it is catalyzed by one or more of these things (I had installed the new nVidia driver, Office 2013, and set fraps to autostart all fairly recently before that - granted, the build is only about a month old, so everything is fairly recently for it, making it hard to pin down an exct cause).

Explanation: Doing the research I did, I learned that since Vista, Windows is by default set up to automatically throttle power supplied to the GPU when it is not doing any 3D Rendering. Since that same release, Windows also kills the GPU's kernel mode driver if it fails to respond for a predefined amount of time or performs some illegal action (kills it instead of/to prevent the a BSOD or system lockup). Then the driver restarts and everything is fine again.

    So, our problem (this crash becoming a recurring issue) arises when a non-3D program polls the GPU (Fraps) or uses hardware accelerated graphics (Office) when there is not some other high priority graphics use or 3D rendering going on to keep the OS from throttling the GPU. The GPU is in use for 2D hardware acceleration, but the OS throttles it anyway. At this point, since the acceleration has suddenly slowed or stopped (which may or may not cause a freeze, depending on how well the application handles this even, I surmise) the OS kills the driver and restarts it.

Solution:

1. Open up your power options (Control Panel -> Power Options)
2. Pick whichever plan setting you wish to run (if you are running a desktop, id suggest High Performance) and click "Change plan settings"
3. Click "Change advanced power settings"
4. Scroll to PCI Express->Link State Power Management->Setting and set it to "Off".

I was having this extremely vexing issue with my desktop when using Office 2013, much more often when running Fraps at the same time (Fraps does video card polling, i believe, accelerating the process). Since I disabled LSPM, the driver has not crashed once.

Citations:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2665946/en-us

I am most definitely missing things here, nor am i attempting to claim that all of this info is mine. In fact, this is just me piecing things together. I did write all the text in this post myself, other than links or specifically quoted pieces.