Windows 10 video driver stopped responding

Just imagine the situation: Friday evening, cool weather outside, rain... What to do at this time on the eve of the weekend? Turn on the computer, launch your favorite online shooter in order to shoot a dozen or two opponents, or complete several quests in order to get some coins and level up in the third Witcher. Shortly after the game starts, gameplay is interrupted and a “Video driver has stopped responding...” alert appears.

Having tried my luck for the second time to spend several tens of minutes playing my favorite entertainment, nothing changed - soon after launching the application the same notification appeared, interrupting the gameplay.

This error occurs only on Windows 10 when using a significant part of the hardware capabilities of the video card to carry out complex calculations in resource-intensive applications, which is relevant for all three-dimensional games released in recent years, as well as when converting videos or visualizing complex three-dimensional scenes in graphic editors, or when rendering videos in a video editor.

Let's look at the most common reasons why your Windows 10 video driver stops responding when launching 3D games and try to solve this problem.

Reason for the alert

Before we start looking for solutions to the problem, let's find out why the video driver stops responding.

In Windows released after XP, developers introduced a mechanism responsible for restarting a driver that has stopped responding or is taking an extremely long time to respond to system requests. This mechanism is called Timeout Detection & Recovery or TDR for short. There is no single reason that causes the trigger to fire and the subsequent restart of the video driver. Such an alert can be caused by a number of factors that contribute to a significant increase in the response time of the program for controlling the operation of the video card.

The appearance of a pop-up notification with a message that your computer's video driver has stopped responding, in most cases, does not promise anything serious. This is just a trigger of the Windows 10 protection mechanism against software errors. It allows you to get rid of the appearance of BSOD, which would inevitably result in a similar problem in XP, the need to shut down all applications and restart the computer.

The triggering of the TDR routine, which restarts a video driver that has stopped responding to its requests, is not so much a problem of Windows 10 developers as a flaw in the manufacturers of graphics processors and drivers for them. Representatives of all companies producing video cards promise that the problem causing the TDR mechanism to be triggered will definitely be corrected in the next version of the driver, but things are still there. And many years have passed since the release of Vista and Windows 7.

Unstable driver version installed

Downloading and downloading a new video driver immediately after it is released is not always the best solution. It happens that when fixing errors, programmers unwittingly introduce new ones, and learn about them only after the first hundreds and even thousands of users encounter a problem. This is especially true for alpha versions of GPU drivers.

If Windows 10 or the utility for updating your computer software detects a new video driver, you should not rush to download it, it is better to wait a few days. During this time, its main shortcomings, if any, will appear and be corrected.

When, after updating the system, a notification appears that the video card driver has stopped responding, you need to restore its previous version. This is done in two ways:

manual removal of software, downloading and installing a new video driver;
rollback to the previous driver version.

Let's consider the second option due to the simplicity of its implementation in Windows 10.

Launch "Device Manager".

Expand the “Video adapters” line and call up the properties of the video card whose driver has stopped responding.

Let's go to the second tab.

Click “Roll Back” to remove the current video driver, restoring its previous version.

We agree with the rollback.

After a few minutes, Windows 10 will restore the outdated version of the software, which can be found in the lines “Development date” and “Driver version”.

If the message “The video driver has stopped responding...” does not disappear after a rollback, try updating the video card driver, which can be done either manually or automatically. In the first case, we go to the manufacturer’s website, find the necessary software, download and install it, followed by rebooting Windows 10. In the second, we follow the iterations of the diagram below.

Call up the video adapter properties dialog.

In the second tab, click “Update”.

Select automatic software search on the Internet.

After the operation is successfully completed, you will see the following information window, after closing which we reboot Windows 10.

Installing the latest version of DirectX

The user, as a rule, does not update the software environment for the functioning of 3D applications on Windows 10. In most cases, DirectX installation occurs automatically during the installation of game repacks. But the problem is that the authors complete the repacks with versions of DirectX that are current at the time the assembly was created, and the user can download the game many months after it is posted online. During this time, Microsoft may slightly update the API set.

To update the set of libraries, you need to visit the download section of the Microsoft website, download the latest version of the DirectX installer and install it following the instructions provided.

Configuring smoothing parameters

If the above options for manipulating software versions did not help get rid of the error with the message that the GPU driver has stopped responding, you need to delve into the settings of the video adapter. The problem may be inconsistencies in the graphics core parameters in Windows 10 and games. For example, “Antialiasing” can be turned off in the driver settings, and in the game configuration menu its value is set to 2x or 8x.

The same goes for triple buffering and texture filtering, although inconsistencies in anti-aliasing settings are the root cause of the problem.

To fix the problem, go to the video card configuration menu or game application settings and set the key parameters to be the same for the game and the video card operation control panel.

If the individual approach to the settings of each entertainment application does not suit you, use the automatic selection of game parameters function and reset the GPU settings to factory settings.

Excessive overclocking or overheating of equipment

Some users who increase the operating voltage and frequencies of key video card elements do not take into account the increase in the operating temperature of the device and do not equip the device with improved cooling, which also leads to driver freezes. The GPU temperature can be viewed in GPU-Z or HWInfo.

An increase in temperature can also be caused by several other factors:

the radiator and fan are completely clogged with dust;

The thermal paste between the graphics core and the heatsink has not been changed for a long time and has lost its original physical parameters;

due to wear and tear of the mechanical parts of the cooling system (lack of lubrication and, as a result, increased resistance during cooler rotation).

Some users have encountered overestimation of operating frequencies by the manufacturer, reducing which even by 1-3% stabilizes the operation of the device without noticeably affecting its performance. This problem, for example, was noticed with the 560Ti video card from Gigabyte, the video driver of which was constantly restarted by the “ten”. Replacing the BIOS of a video card or lowering its frequency characteristics is the way out.

Changing TDR Settings

The last thing you can do if your GPU driver stops responding is to increase its response time before restarting the driver.

Launch the registry editor (enter “regedit” in the search bar) and follow the path:

We create a DWORD parameter with a bit depth that matches the Windows 10 installed on the PC.

Enter its name as “TdrDelay”.
Set the delay time in seconds and click OK.

Reboot the PC.

Now the OS will report that the driver has stopped responding after 8 seconds of no response, and not after 2, as was previously the case.

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