Timout Detection and Recovery

I recently switched my system to a SSD since my last hard drive seemed to be making a few heaves towards death. Ever since then, Windows 7 has been giving me a totally new headache: The Display Driver Timed Out and Has Been Recovered. City of Heroes.exe was closed.

This is 100% new and I didn't have this problem prior to my SSD switch; has anyone had this garbage affect them, and if so, how did you kill it? I'm running on a dual-booted Macbook Pro; the card NEVER does anything like this macside, so it's not a hardware issue. I've had the card time out when browsing in Chrome, so it's not a heavy graphics issue. I've had the card time out when it's 107 degrees fahrenheit, so it's not a temperature issue. As far as I can tell, it's Windows being Windows. I need to be able to nuke this TDR crap Mickeysoft installed with Vista and 7; anyone have any insight?

What's the card and what drivers are you using? I presume you reinstalled after replacing the drive so it's quite possible you're now running a different driver revision and that is what's causing the problem?

Given it's a Mac I'm assuming an ATI card? If so then there are a lot of known issues with CoH in a lot of the driver versions.

Shameless bump. I'd really like some assistance here.

I don't have an answer for you, but I will chime in.

The "nvidia display driver stopped working" is a bug that has been around for a long time time now (I still run with an nvidia 8800gt ssc). I forget when it was introduced, but the odd thing is that I stopped getting it when issue 21 hit. It appears that since this week's patch, I'm getting it quite frequently now. Between it and and running out memory forcing a crash to desktop, playing CoH has gotten quite frustrating. I should also note, that the only other time it comes up is with Champions Online (i.e., this doesn't really feel like a driver issue, but a game engine issue).

People have talked about uninstalling drivers and reinstalling them, there was a registry setting that could be altered that changed the timeout setting before the video reset itself -- I've tried all of those things without success. It may have been my imagination, or just dumb luck, but I find it odd that it seemed to disappear for a short while.

This error message occurs when the GPU hangs (or crashes) in response to either a driver bug or a hardware failure. It is also possible for OpenCL and DirectCompute application bugs to trigger this (City of Heroes does not use either of these).

On versions of Windows before Windows Vista, this would have resulted in a Blue Screen of Death, but newer versions of Windows require drivers to be able to reset when the GPU crashes instead of forcing Windows to reboot. Unfortunately, 3D applications are not able to automatically recover after this occurs and need to be restarted.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/wind...dware/gg487368

It is an issue thats been affecting people with some applications, incl. adobe photoshop, browers, and games of course. I've had it occur with World of Tanks, but not COX. Lots of things to try, but none seem to be an exact fix for everyone.

The latest nvidia drivers are suppose to address it for some cards, but my case it may have helped WOT, but I got the error just opening Firefox?

I've had some luck down clocking my memory and adjusting, nvidia global control settings, to "perfer maximum performance". This would seem to be directly related as the card doesn't down clock while operating in 2D mode negating the power cycle timeout?

Here is the thread on nvidias forum if you wanna look through the 100+ threads on the issue.
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=187401

I just upgraded from XP to Win 7 and from a 9800GT to a GTX550Ti, and BAM, this very problem hit me hard, making the game unplayable. I put the 9800GT back in and installed the correct drivers for it (clean install) and the problem went away.

The video card is going back to NewEgg tomorrow. ( <3 their return policy)

This is probably not helpful, but it's a data point.