Nvidia Power management Settings crashing driver--FIX

[Bugnexus7]

I was having driver crashes where the screen would suddenly go blank on my main screen and a Windows error message would pop up on my other monitor informing me that my graphics driver had experienced an error, stopped and recovered. At this point Skyrim would pop back onto my main monitor and everything would be fine. Twice, it didn't pop back up but usually all was well after that.

 

It wasn't until I was playing Blizzard's Heroes of The Storm and started experiencing a complete game crash as a result of my driver restarting (in this case, trying to). So, it was a problem with BOTH games. This led me to the driver. Searching around I discovered that Nvidia has been distributing it's driver packages (for quite some time) with the Power Management Mode setting set to "Adaptive". I hadn't noticed they changed this at some point, and apparently both Skyrim and Heroes of the Storm have issues with the "Adaptive" setting.

 

I'm guessing that altering the power-flow through the video card requires it to "pause" while the card reconfgures, and that Skyrim and Heroes of The Storm don't handle this "pause" well--Skyrim recovers, while HoTS bombs entirely.

 

Anyway, long story short, if you're having issues like this, the fix is easy--disable the Power Management Mode altogether.

 

1)Open Nvidia Control panel and go to the "Manage 3D Settings" tab

2)Select the "Global Settings" tab

3) Change Power Management Mode from "Adaptive" to "Prefer Maximum Performance"

4)(Optional) If you have profiles for other games in Nvidia Control Panel, make sure you change the setting for those too, if you're having similar problems with that game.

 

FYI

Windows 7 64-bit

i7-4770 3.4GHz

GeForce 760 4GB (stock-clocking)

12GB RAM

 

Hope this helps others!

Ciao!

Bug