Notice About Recent Nvidia Driver Stability

Dicehunter

Resident Newb
nvidia_zpsed5f9df6.png



Last night I finished testing all recent Nvidia drivers from 350.12 up until the latest Hotfix 353.12.

The result is that all of the recent drivers suffer from the annoying -

"The driver has stopped responding" or "Nvidia Kernel Mode Driver has stopped responding and has recovered".

When either on the desktop or using Firefox and Chrome.


Results

350.12 WHQL - Most stable driver and doesn't suffer from driver crashes as often.

350.12 Xtreme-G Tweakforce - Best performance so far.

352.86 WHQL - This is when the driver bug was introduced for a lot of people.

352.94 iCafe - Same as the previous driver albeit the crashes seem to be spaced further apart

353.06 WHQL- Still the same kernel crashing going on.

353.12 Hotfix - Exactly the same as 353.06 but with a G-Sync fix.


My testing methodology was leaving a YouTube video of around 30 minutes running, First with Chrome and then with Firefox, So any OC3D review, Looping Unigine Valley for 30 minutes and just staying on the desktop for 30 minutes, I did this for each card tested.



I tested using a GTX 970 overclocked to 1500 on the core and 7800 on the memory, GTX 980 overclocked to 1500 on the core and 7800 on the memory and GTX Titan X overclocked to 1400 on the core and 8000 on the memory and found 350.12WHQL and the XtremeG-Tweakforce driver which is essentially just a tweaked version of 350.12 but modded for ever so slightly better performance and image quality to be the most stable to date.


I don't know what's going on at Nvidia HQ but they badly need to sort this out, I didn't test with any other cards so your mileage may vary but if you are on the above cards I highly recommend either 350.12 WHQL or the Xtreme-G Tweakforce version.


*Update*

Turning off hardware acceleration in Firefox and Chrome has helped some people avoid the driver issues, Some report it works others not so much.
 
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Annoying as 350.12 doesn't have an SLI profile for Witcher 3 so I'm gonna have to wait to play it if I want to play at max settings!
 
Annoying as 350.12 doesn't have an SLI profile for Witcher 3 so I'm gonna have to wait to play it if I want to play at max settings!

Not the best situation I know but you can easily max it at 1080P with 1 x 980 and get 60FPS while we wait for a more stable driver to be released :)
 
At first I thought it was a problem with my card because I wasn't getting crashes with my 670, really hope this gets fixed soon because on top of the general game crashes I get with GTA V, this has stopped me from being able to do any heists and also means I have to play the Witcher in stints of between 30 minutes - 2 hours. Quite annoying really to spend £280 on a card, only for it to crash every time I want to do anything.

For reference I have not experienced the crashes while using chrome or any benchmarks, only had it happen when running GTA and Witcher.
 
Thanks for your testing. What you are reporting seems to be consistent with many users findings. I haven't been able to use any of the 35X.XX drivers with my GTX 780M SLI because they all cause severe throttling. Going back to 345.20 and older drivers, they work flawlessly.

I'm going to see if the iCafe drivers in the newer branches allow my GPUs to work correctly.
 
Actually nVidias drivers have been like this quite a bit lately. I think its getting to AMD and they are slowing down as well. Still I guess AMDs drivers are much better than before.
 
Seems like some people with 7xx GPUs are having issues too. Good thing you did this as I was going to update.
 
So it turns out I am still getting crashes even with the 347.52 drivers, think it might actually be my card. Asus have recommended an RMA :(
 
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