175.16 - NVLDDMKM.dll error still happening... anyone else?

Status
Not open for further replies.
Maybe we should bring in McGuyver for backup, though. I have some string, a rubberband, and some glue.

Boy, this is deteriorating rapidly.
 
sounds good i can here them now. 'When our powers combine, we become..... God' hahahahha
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
I've ran both the GTX 260 & 280 on my system. Neither one showed the BSoD through the entire time of continuous gaming over the past 2 months. I have a feeling that Nvidia fixed the issue quietly in their latest GPUs. Might be a combination of hardware and drivers, too.
Click to expand...

Nope I am afraid not, I get the same issue with my GTX280's :mad:
I have done a complete Vista reload and am about to start going through the possible fixes on this thread.... the folding GPU client is what kills it the quickest. I get graphical glitches across my screens then BSOD.
By the way the setup (sans 1 280) worked fine in XP.
 
With the graphical glitches, that actually sounds like a bad card...but it could well be driver related.
 
mach1.9pants said:
Nope I am afraid not, I get the same issue with my GTX280's :mad:
I have done a complete Vista reload and am about to start going through the possible fixes on this thread.... the folding GPU client is what kills it the quickest. I get graphical glitches across my screens then BSOD.
By the way the setup (sans 1 280) worked fine in XP.
Click to expand...

Try switching out the memory, or testing 1 module at a time to see if it still happens.
 
My system is alot more stable since I tested my ram and found one set of ram sticks faulty. Use memtest86 and make sure you run it through at least 10 cycles or so. Other words over night. Make sure you have no errors. Seems its helped most of my windows problems.
 
I was having a lot of issues with this error in Vista Home Premium 32bit on an EVGA 780i board. I have 4gb of Gskill 1000mhz memory, but if the motherboard was set to auto it would read 800mhz. With my memory 1000mhz I was able to run Memtest and Prime95 all night without errors.

I finally set my memory to 800mhz and changed all the timings from auto to manual with the exact same settings. I also adjusted the voltage from 2.1v to 1.8v and the system has been stable since.

I recently did a Trade-up on my 9800gtx to a 280, and I put my old ATI Radeon 1950pro in the system while I waited for the Trade-up process. I reset my memory to 1000mhz just to see if it was just an Nvidia problem. The same thing happened with the ATI driver, I switched the memory back to 800mhz and it was stable the whole time.
 
Now that I updated to the latest beta drivers, problem is back.

YAY!

Only now it doesn't blue screen out, still get the message that the driver failed though.

I'm about 1 crash from switching to ATi and selling my 2 8800 GTS pretty friggin cheap.
 
Well, no blue screen means that it at least recovered. You can always roll back to the drivers that worked.
 
I just RMA'd my 8800GT 512MB because of this issue. I used to get it once in awhile, but recently it would crash constantly before vista would BSOD.

I did a google search and went through all the voodoo fixes and finally decided to get the card replaced.

I just hope the replacement card doesn't start having this issue, it was a real annoyance troubleshooting the last one.
 
I'm the one who started this thread, and to this day I still get the crashing. I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that there's nothing I can do about it short of buying a new PC really.

The best nvidia really offered me was to have me ship out the machine and have them tinker with it for a few weeks but that just doesn't cut it. I didn't buy into a completely nvidia machine to be a test bunny... (nvidia 680i, nvidia 8800gtx sli, and even nvidia certified OCZ sli ram lol). I assumed having all nvidia branded parts would yield a reliable system, which was totally incorrect.

Seems to me there's still a serious problem and no one has a clue how to fix it, or they would have.
 
Strangly enough, when I increased my Dram voltage after adding 4 more gigs the problem with the driver locking up largely sent away. (It has ahppened once since, rather then every five minutes in City of Heroes, or twice within the first 15 minutes of starting WOW)

I wonder if the drivers are just accessing Ram in a more um, intense, way?

Be interested if this helps anyone out?

There is also a hot fix for vista for multi-core systems to address a timing issue for this problem as well. (it helped me some but wasnt a magic cure all)
 
Yeah, I think that the main problem is that there are so many potential causes for this error, that it's hard to nail down ONE thing that fixes all of them. I am so sorry that you're still having those issues, and I guess it's cold comfort knowing that you're one of many. In the end, it may be just easier to do what the others have done and go buy an ATI card. *sigh*
 
Heather Taylor said:
Yeah, I think that the main problem is that there are so many potential causes for this error, that it's hard to nail down ONE thing that fixes all of them. I am so sorry that you're still having those issues, and I guess it's cold comfort knowing that you're one of many. In the end, it may be just easier to do what the others have done and go buy an ATI card. *sigh*
Click to expand...

Try going to google then search for atikmdag or atikmdag.sys. Ah first search result "Vista and 7.3 Display driver atikmdag stopped responding error" ah omg omg. Ah another one "BSoD Problem ATIKMDAG.SYS of Catalyst 7.4 and HP32 ATi X1950GT ...", oh oh what the omg. In case you didn't know "atikmdag.sys" is the main library file for ati drivers, and look the same error message. Assuming it is a nvidia only issue is ignorance.

That isn't a personal attack on you just pointing out how many people don't know what they're talking about when it comes to that error message.

All that stopped responding error message means is vista is saying "uhhh a crash of some sort happened and I think its the video card because I don't have any better ideas and it was the last driver running."
 
Tch, read the entire thread, my dear--we've discussed this very same thing over and over again for the last 11 pages.

I am very well aware--as is everyone here--that the crash is common to both ATI and NVIDIA. Switching to ATI often solves the problem, as does moving to other versions of NVIDIA cards or using other NVIDIA driver versions. I was being blase.

I have specifically been working on this particular version of the error with the guys at NVIDIA--it is a TDR timeout problem within the operating system that causes the subsequent NVIDIA or ATI error, not the other way around. We have been down this path before. The chain of consequence can be started by failing hardware, driver conflicts OTHER than video drivers, etc., but the end result is the same.

Go back through and read all the posts and then add your two cents. If you have anything to add other than what's been stated already, I'd be interested to hear it. I'm compiling all the information from this thread and handing it off to the the NVIDIA engineers to help our customers and those in the thread who are frustrated with this issue.
 
Simple solution:
Step 1: Uninstall Windows Vista
Step 2: Install Windows XP

But seriously, I've tried Vista numerous times since it released, each time hoping this problem would go away, and every time I've always ended up going back to XP within a week. It's too bad, Vista has some great stuff to offer but it's all worthless with this error constantly occurring.
 
I didn't read the thread, but my friend had the same issue on the 175 drivers. Uninstall the drivers in safe mode and install 178.24 or 180.48 (can cause stuttering in some games) depending on which one you prefer.
 
For those who've come late to the thread, this is the basic answer to the "why" of this error (it was stated back on page 7ish):

Ok, so I did get an answer from our NVIDIA reps.

"WinVista changed the way a device driver interacts with the operating system. Pre-Vista, the driver had direct access to Kernel mode functions and if a driver misbehaved, the whole system would crash. With WinVista, all non-MSFT device drivers are moved out of the kernel and into the user mode space so a bad driver will not crash the system. Instead, the system will load a generic MSFT driver, reset the 3rd-party driver and reload it all without crashing the system. The NVLDDMKM error is what the user sees when a TDR has occurred and the driver has reset.

This only happens in WinVista. WinXP will crash if there is a driver hang.
TDR is the side-effect or result of a driver/application issue.
Newer drivers may help resolve the number of TDR’s.

There is no way to get the TDR’s to stop without figuring out what is causing the original driver faults. You really need to treat this as any other standard tech support issue and have your techs do what they can do to help identify the root cause. Bad hardware or programs can also force a video card TDR.

More and more users are adopting WinVista which is why you are encountering more cases now. If these cases are happening too frequently, report this to your card vendor partner. They have the ability to log these issues with us directly."

So, it looks like the best that all of us can do is to report the issue directly to the card manufacturer and let them interact with NVIDIA.

If you guys need any help, I can try to get you contact information.
 
I've stripped my system down completely to a single hard drive, evga (nvidia) 680i motherboard and evga 8800gtx (again, nvidia), and a completely fresh vista install and still had crashes. No soundcard, no printer, no external hard drive, no nothing... its just nvidia hardware. So as far as I'm concerned nvidia needs to address the problem, not me. I've also tried different ram, and swapping 8800gtx video cards.

Might I add XP runs like a champ. Only DX10 games crash, crysis, red alert 3, world in conflict, you name it. If it's DX10, it'll inevitably crash. It's done this to this day and I'm on 180.48 drivers, so it's unquestionably a nvidia problem...
 
My Nv driver crash and lockups, BSODs (on occasion) etc in City of Heroes was resolved with a server side fix for a bug in the in-game chat system.

Whoever said there are many casues and ways to crash your vid driver got it right.
 
I'm talking to EVGA reps now, hopefully they can come up with a solution we havent thought of yet!
 
I get the driver failure almost daily since I installed the latest drivers. Yay.

I've been an nvidia fan for a long time now, but if they don't fix this I'm trading in my 2 8800 gtxs for anything with red in it.
 
Heather Taylor said:
Tch, read the entire thread, my dear--we've discussed this very same thing over and over again for the last 11 pages.

I am very well aware--as is everyone here--that the crash is common to both ATI and NVIDIA. Switching to ATI often solves the problem, as does moving to other versions of NVIDIA cards or using other NVIDIA driver versions. I was being blase.

I have specifically been working on this particular version of the error with the guys at NVIDIA--it is a TDR timeout problem within the operating system that causes the subsequent NVIDIA or ATI error, not the other way around. We have been down this path before. The chain of consequence can be started by failing hardware, driver conflicts OTHER than video drivers, etc., but the end result is the same.

Go back through and read all the posts and then add your two cents. If you have anything to add other than what's been stated already, I'd be interested to hear it. I'm compiling all the information from this thread and handing it off to the the NVIDIA engineers to help our customers and those in the thread who are frustrated with this issue.
Click to expand...


That's all fine and dandy.

I'd just rather not have someone say, "In the end, it may be just easier to do what the others have done and go buy an ATI card. *sigh*", because that isn't true. Some average joe schmoe who reads this forum is going to read that and think its true when it isn't. The average reader takes things out of context and doesn't realize you're being apathetic or being sarcastic.

Not even an integrated intel gpu on a mobo is immune to that error. In fact it could even be bad system ram since the integrated gpu uses system ram. If its a low end turbocache card it could even be system ram still, since the turbocache cards can use some system ram.

Another example of "not either video device" I have heard of someone with an intel board who got post artifacts so he thought the integrated gpu was faulty. So he throws in a 7200gs and guess what still post artifacts. You know what it was? It was system ram all along and the 7200gs being a turbocache card used some memory from the same bad stick of ram and caused post artifacts even with the pci-e card. *Sometimes the issue is just a lil outside the "box".

Back to the tdr issue. Basically the only time this is really a cause of a video card is if the card is blantly faulty i.e. post artifacts, artifacts in 3d apps, fan is faulty so the card is allowed to overheat, etc..

The "go buy another brand" argument (joke, sarcasm, in a non caring mood, etc..) is about as valid as "I had goodyear tires on my car before, but I kept getting flats so now I go with only pirelli tires and I have not had a flat in 3 years." When in reality he/she stopped getting flats because he/she stopped driving over nails or going through construction zones.

I don't mean to bug, but it just irks me when borderline bad information is out there the masses can misunderstand
 
RyanLucier said:
I've stripped my system down completely to a single hard drive, evga (nvidia) 680i motherboard and evga 8800gtx (again, nvidia), and a completely fresh vista install and still had crashes. No soundcard, no printer, no external hard drive, no nothing... its just nvidia hardware. So as far as I'm concerned nvidia needs to address the problem, not me. I've also tried different ram, and swapping 8800gtx video cards.

Might I add XP runs like a champ. Only DX10 games crash, crysis, red alert 3, world in conflict, you name it. If it's DX10, it'll inevitably crash. It's done this to this day and I'm on 180.48 drivers, so it's unquestionably a nvidia problem...
Click to expand...
Are you using the default Vista drivers for the motherboard or installing the Nforce packages? If you are, stop. Vista defaults are better.

Also, 680i gave me NOTHING but troubles. It could be a bad board ( I know you don't want to hear it, or believe it), but it's quite possibility your motherboard since you did try other graphics cards. The 680i had compatibility issues with some hard drives, I would believe that some Vista/DX10 issues might exist with it.
 
only problem with that chris, is that the system/cards work absolutely perfect in windows xp. I have a hard time believing the motherboard is faulty when only an operating system causes it?

I've pretty much come the conclusion the only way im going to fix this problem is by either a) swapping motherboards, b) swapping video cards, or c) perhaps swapping a power supply if A and B don't fix it.
 
RyanLucier said:
only problem with that chris, is that the system/cards work absolutely perfect in windows xp. I have a hard time believing the motherboard is faulty when only an operating system causes it?
Click to expand...
Yeah, but you said DX10 (Vista). And I could see the rare case of a motherboard not liking an OS. And honestly, a 680i is the board to do it, with all the reports about them. I had one before, I know what type of trouble they are.
I've pretty much come the conclusion the only way im going to fix this problem is by either a) swapping motherboards, b) swapping video cards, or c) perhaps swapping a power supply if A and B don't fix it.
Click to expand...
I was going to suggest to try another video card, but you said you already tried another 8800GTX, I thought? If it's just a DX10 error, but games run fine/stable in DX9 mode, that would lead me to believe a video card.
Click to expand...
 
sh0vet said:
I don't mean to bug, but it just irks me when borderline bad information is out there the masses can misunderstand
Click to expand...

Point taken, and I apologize for the rather flippant comment I made. The bad thing is that we're ("we" being computer manufacturers in general) just as frustrated as all of the people who've posted in this thread. It's incredibly time consuming to chase down the cause of the error because, as you said, it can be caused by bad memory, faulty MB, etc. I have even had techs tear down an entire system and rebuild it with all new parts, and the error persisted. It's the bane of our existance.

As a side note, the explanation of the *.dll error came directly from NVIDIA and it is what they believe causes the firing of the error. That may have changed as more information has been recorded, but if that's the case, I haven't been told.

The most effective way to handle the problem at this point is to work directly with the card manufacturer so that they can communicate with either NVIDIA or ATI. To help things along, I would encourage everyone to get the basic troubleshooting (memtest, hard drive diagnostics, driver updates, etc) out of the way prior to logging a ticket, just so that the techs can rule out memory failure or driver issues from the beginning.
 
Heather Taylor said:
Point taken, and I apologize for the rather flippant comment I made. The bad thing is that we're ("we" being computer manufacturers in general) just as frustrated as all of the people who've posted in this thread. It's incredibly time consuming to chase down the cause of the error because, as you said, it can be caused by bad memory, faulty MB, etc. I have even had techs tear down an entire system and rebuild it with all new parts, and the error persisted. It's the bane of our existance.

As a side note, the explanation of the *.dll error came directly from NVIDIA and it is what they believe causes the firing of the error. That may have changed as more information has been recorded, but if that's the case, I haven't been told.

The most effective way to handle the problem at this point is to work directly with the card manufacturer so that they can communicate with either NVIDIA or ATI. To help things along, I would encourage everyone to get the basic troubleshooting (memtest, hard drive diagnostics, driver updates, etc) out of the way prior to logging a ticket, just so that the techs can rule out memory failure or driver issues from the beginning.
Click to expand...
If the customers are able to do that, they would have probably built a system themselves, not just buy a custom PC.
 
Then get in touch with me, and I will make the necessary connections. In the end, I really want to see this resolved, and it takes people like all of you stepping forward to provide the information I need to make them FIX this.
 
Heather Taylor said:
Then get in touch with me, and I will make the necessary connections. In the end, I really want to see this resolved, and it takes people like all of you stepping forward to provide the information I need to make them FIX this.
Click to expand...

The errors you describe are called TDRs (Timeout Detection and Recovery).

They occur when:

1. An application sends work to the graphics driver and card which takes 2 seconds or more to complete. This would be the fault of the application, overwhelming the graphics drivers/card with work by causing them to take over 2 seconds to render the frame.

2. The graphics driver hits an exception due to a driver bug (nvidia had a lot of these issues at Vista launch, the vast majority of which have been resolved). This would obviously be the fault of the graphics driver programmers.

3. The graphics driver gets bad data due to defective hardware/video memory/system memory and causes the driver to crash by giving it back bogus values. This would be the fault of the defective hardware.

Since, as you can see there are multiple causes, it's hard to say what the cause is in each particular case, but you can narrow down the issue by swapping out system memory, and swapping to a different but identical card to eliminate the defective memory as the cause.

It should also be noted that these are also prevalent on the ATI side (of course the error in that case is then "the display driver atikmdag.sys has stopped responding" instead), so this is not an NVIDIA specific issue.
 
Yep, that's been stated earlier in the thread, but thanks for re-summarizing because it needed to be reposted.

We have a good grasp on the whys and hows at this point, and NVIDIA has requested that each person who does the troubleshooting you've detailed and who are still getting the error relay that information to the video card manufacturer. The goal here is to compile the information instead of having it scattered across the interwebs.
 
Heather Taylor said:
Yep, that's been stated earlier in the thread, but thanks for re-summarizing because it needed to be reposted.

We have a good grasp on the whys and hows at this point, and NVIDIA has requested that each person who does the troubleshooting you've detailed and who are still getting the error relay that information to the video card manufacturer. The goal here is to compile the information instead of having it scattered across the interwebs.
Click to expand...

Sure.. I just didn't bother to read the 12 previous pages cause I'm lazy :) Clear steps to reproduce are always best for tracking these issues down.
 
i only get this crash in hl1 engine.. cs1.6 to be exact, and it hits exactly ~1hr into playing. never sooner and never longer.. its made me not want to play the game i love qq..

other games dont crash that i have, hl2 engine, aoc, farcry2, crysis, cod4
 
Started getting "display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered" under Vista 64 in Left 4 Dead. The only change with my system recently was replacing my Audigy 2 with an X-Fi Titanium the other day. :\
 
well im in the club too guys.

my error occurs randomely while playing any games, Hell the only game I really play anymore is TA Spring.

I am talking to XFX right now trying to get a new card or something.
 
Just to reiterate for those not reading back, my issue was my RAM. Swapped RAM and this issue occurring all the time completely disappeared. So try to do a general system health check you might be surprised what causes it.
 
Memory passes memtest86+ all day and night long. Swapped memory. Swapped PSUs. Swapped APUs. Swapped GPUs. Three entirely different systems - one even ATi and they all get god damn TDRs under Vista 64 SP1. Not thrilled. Apparently KB952287 started causing this issue in Vista for a lot of people so uninstalled that and waiting to see if the TDRs continue to happen. So infrequent it makes troubleshooting a real pain in the ass.
 
Just thought I'd give you guys a little update here. I was the original guy who started this thread 6 or so months ago.

I ended up buying a new core i7 920 system on an asus p6t deluxe, corsair dominator 6gb 1600mhz ddr3 ram, corsair HX1000W psu, coolermaster HAF 932 case, sata dvd drive, and apogee gtz cpu waterblock. Basically, not a single component was used from the old system besides the 8800gtx sli, not even the damn screws ;P

Guess what? Problem was still there. It was definitely the cards or the software driving the cards, no question about it. Things had actually gotten progressively worse though, things were now crashing even in dx9 applications and just random things altogether before I bought the i7 920, and the same sort of instability was seen on the i7 920 as well. So I decided to RMA the cards. It didn't make sense that it was software based as the problem seems to have "spread" and widened to general instability.

EVGA sent me a set of two 8800gtx cards, unfortunately one of them is DOA. It worked once and stopped working thereafter. Even put it in the other Q6600 system and it still was DOA. Hopefully it didn't damage my new i7 920 system in any way... When these cards stop working, I can't help but think they don't do so gracefully, and probably send feedback into the system among other things... I personally think it's a crock of garbage that RMA hardware doesnt have to be new, because refurbished hardware is NEVER as good as new hardware. I end up testing half cooked hardware that might do damage to my system... But I don't want to get into a rant regarding RMA's, that isnt the point of this thread.

EDIT: got a 2nd set of cards from EVGA, these ones are borked too! tried two GTX260's that I *know* work in another system and I've played hours and hours of gaming with not a single hitch... so the 8800gtx's evga keeps sending me just keep failing or are dead on arrival etc..
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top