So, while watching some video files, my screens went black and then came back on. According to Windows event viewer, the driver was restarted due to a TDR error (No BSOD, it recovered successfully). Naturally, I started monitoring my GPU more closely for the next few hours to see if it would happen again/what might have caused it. It was then that I noticed my VRAM usage was climbing to an absurd level considering all I was doing was browsing the internet/watching Twitch. I checked task manager for processes using dedicated GPU memory, and noticed explorer.exe was using roughly 2 out of 4 gigs and climbing (despite not doing anything with explorer), in addition to the normal usage from firefox and such. A simple restart of the process and VRAM is back down to normal and seems to be staying there.
Looking into the TDR error though, I can't really find any info on whether it could've been caused by this. My working theory is that the memory leak + the fact I was watching a 4k video and had a fair few firefox tabs open in the background filled up the VRAM and caused the GPU to timeout and reset the driver to clear VRAM, but there's not really any info on whether VRAM getting maxed out can cause a TDR. That feels like the most logical explanation compared to if the TDR was entirely unrelated to a VRAM memory leak that was ocurring at the same time. Most info i've found says it's either a driver issue or the card is dying or something. It seems to be working fine now, but idk. The card is getting pretty old, it's a 1050 ti.
Looking into the TDR error though, I can't really find any info on whether it could've been caused by this. My working theory is that the memory leak + the fact I was watching a 4k video and had a fair few firefox tabs open in the background filled up the VRAM and caused the GPU to timeout and reset the driver to clear VRAM, but there's not really any info on whether VRAM getting maxed out can cause a TDR. That feels like the most logical explanation compared to if the TDR was entirely unrelated to a VRAM memory leak that was ocurring at the same time. Most info i've found says it's either a driver issue or the card is dying or something. It seems to be working fine now, but idk. The card is getting pretty old, it's a 1050 ti.
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