Can TDRs really ruin a GPU?

GameLifter

GameLifter

Gawd
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Sep 4, 2014
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Since I got my 980Ti and updated to the latest driver with the hotfix I get a driver crash every once and a while with certain games at certain settings.The TDRs aren't frequent enough to be a huge issue but still annoying. I've seen a few posts on the Nvidia forum where people have claimed that the TDRs have done permanent damage to their cards or they are concerned about them doing permanent damage. So, is it possible that TDRs could cause damage to the card or are these claims false?
 
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No, that's a silly confusion of cause and effect. TDR stands for Timeout Detection and Recovery. WIndows is reloading the driver because a draw call is taking too long and a full system crash is likely.
 
It's a mechanism for.recovering from the GPU taking unusually long to complete something. At which point your machine has probably been locked up for several seconds and the OS resets parts of the graphics stack to regain sanity and unhang your machine.

It's not dangerous. It's there to save you from a hard reboot.
 
I assume that this is happening at stock settings? On my 980ti I get a TRD every now and then with a high OC (1500 core) but have yet to get one on stock clocks. This card is very strange, I can run valley/haven for 4+ hours with oc no problem, but will get a random crash in farcry 4 and witcher 3 sometimes. It seems very random, yesterday played witcher for 3 hours without a crash, today got one after 20 minutes. Hoping new drivers fix this.
 
Unfortunately bad drivers have been very common with Nvidia's latest hardware even when they pass WHQL certification. Makes you question what WHQL even means in this day and age. Hope Nvidia does something to fix it soon. I had the same issues for a long time when I was running their GPUs. Best thing to do is to report what you were doing when it crashed on the Nvidia forums so that they can track down the problem.

Also as many times that I crashed from similar issues with their GPUs it never damaged mine. So I wouldn't worry about damaging your expensive hardware.
 
TDR was addressed in a recent driver release. If you are having them at stock, I'd consider RMA'ing the card. If you are overclocked, then you aren't giving the card enough voltage. Also third party software like precision x and afterburner can cause stability issues so remove those for stability testing.
 
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Killerxp100 said:
I assume that this is happening at stock settings? On my 980ti I get a TRD every now and then with a high OC (1500 core) but have yet to get one on stock clocks. This card is very strange, I can run valley/haven for 4+ hours with oc no problem, but will get a random crash in farcry 4 and witcher 3 sometimes. It seems very random, yesterday played witcher for 3 hours without a crash, today got one after 20 minutes. Hoping new drivers fix this.
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Yes. I'm at stock settings. I've reverted back to 353.06 since I got more crashes after getting the hot fix. Far Cry 4 gave me crashes when I forced 16x AF and set the negative LOD bias to clamp in the drivers. After setting the negative LOD bias back to "Allow" I stopped getting crashes for now. Also, forcing FXAA for Titanfall gave me very frequent crashes which really stunk because the game looks great with FXAA and has high performance.

Last night I got frequent crashes in Titanfall without forcing any setting in the Nvidia Control Panel and Crysis 3 crashed on me as well. Watch Dogs was fine for three hours while forcing 16x AF/Clamp in the control panel so I guess it varies between games.

I can understand that forcing settings in the control panel can cause games to crash but when they crash with application controlled settings is when there is a problem.

TDR was addressed in a recent driver release. If you are having them at stock, I'd consider RMA'ing the card. If you are overclocked, then you aren't giving the card enough voltage. Also third party software like precision x and afterburner can cause stability issues so remove those for stability testing.
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Thing is, we don't know for sure if the hotfix fully fixed the problem. I tried the hotfix and got more crashes which is what others have reported as well. This makes it hard to tell if it's really my card or the drivers. Now that I know what causes a TDR I won't RMA this card until I'm 100% sure it's not the drivers. Also, I've already RMA'd this card once due to board damage on the first one that I didn't cause but that's another story, lol!
 
I had tdr with gsync and chrome and the latest hotfix completely fixed it. Check the variables i mentioned before claiming its some driver issue.
 
5150Joker said:
I had tdr with gsync and chrome and the latest hotfix completely fixed it. Check the variables i mentioned before claiming its some driver issue.
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I've never had a crash with Chrome. I'm not using any oc utilities either. What prompted me to try the hotfix was me getting a crash with Arkham Origins on driver version 353.30. The hotfix seemed to mainly address the crashes with Chrome and since the crashes in games ramped up for me after trying it I reverted back to 353.06 which has been pretty stable so far. I did get a crash in Titanfall but after repairing the game they haven't happened. I may even try forcing FXAA again. I'll keep playing my games like normal and if the crashes ramp up enough to where it may be a hardware issue I'll RMA this card.
 
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