One of my video cards kept crashing and showing various artifacts. Usually this happened when playing youtube.com videos or using DirectX. Video card was GIGABYTE nVidia GTX 460.

When crashing, Windows temporary disabled both monitors / displays and, then balloon tip appeared showing:
[Display driver stopped responding and has recovered]
Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 266.58 stopped responding and has successfully recovered.


I tried to reproduce this error by opening and playing various video files, including youtube, but without any luck. I couldn’t reproduce this with 100% probability. And after one crash, it was very hard to crash driver again in a reasonable timeframe.

Today, I thought, that I need some way to stress test my video card. One software that I run was Video Card Stability Test from freestone-group.com. Another was famous Stress test – FurMark from ozone3d.net. Both tests crashed my video card constantly within few seconds.

Now changed my video card to another nVidia GTX 460 made by SPARKLE and all problems have gone away.

P.S. Temperature was in normal level when driver crashed – ~50 °C.

P.S.S. Windows Event log was logging multiple: “Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.” events.