- Feb 27, 2022
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I've had this really strange issue that I've failed to troubleshoot for a couple years now, and it's completely stumped me as I've exhausted all of the knowledge I have and have tried every solution I could find online during this period. I'll try to break down the important things I've observed regarding these two issues and I'd be super grateful for anyone that tries to help narrow down what my issue could be. I'm not sure if these two problems are related, but I assume they both suggest some larger issue potentially with my GPU.
Starting with Event 4101 "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered", this one seems to occur almost every time I encounter any sort of video playback for the first time after booting up my computer. For some examples, if I open Steam and the front page has some kind of animated piece, my display will flash black and then recover after a few seconds. If I open Chrome and the page has some sponsored video playing, the same thing will happen. Weirdly enough, this has never happened while playing a game, but booting up some games does trigger this crash. If I open Valorant before encountering the issue, I will not be able to produce the crash and it will prevent it from happening until I boot up the PC again. If I open Halo Infinite, the opening sequence will trigger the crash. Again important to note that once it happens, I can't replicate the crash until I restart my PC. In the past this used to happen 100% of the time, but now it's a bit less consistent. I'm not sure why there are some instances where it won't crash, and I've tried to replicate exactly what I did during those sessions to see if there's something else that prevented it but again it's not consistent. A weird thing I could do with Chrome is open the tab that has the video playing and quickly switch to another tab before the page finishes loading, exit Chrome, open it again, and if I do it carefully enough it somehow prevents the crash from happening. It's really odd.
After this crash happens, there's some really weird things I see change. In NVCP, "Low Latency Mode" gets set to "Custom" and loses the option for "On". I get additional options under "Power management mode" that weren't there before, and I get an option under the "Global Settings" & "Program Settings" tabs that lets me choose my preference between the GTX 1080 and integrated graphics (Intel UHD 630). There's also a message above that drop down menu that notifies me about Windows now being responsible for selecting which one to use, and none of this is there before the crash happens. It will also switch over to another NVIDIA High Definition Audio device and the one that is used on startup becomes disabled. If I'm using Discord and this crash happens, it will ask me if I want to switch to that device as if a new device were plugged in. I have them both set at different volume settings so I know when this happens, but so far it's always done that. For a while it seemed like removing the Intel UHD 630 driver prevented this from happening, but I did eventually run into the crash again and Windows would always update the driver immediately. I tried to reproduce the crash with Microsoft's basic display adapter after using DDU and was unable to. Even after I replaced the basic driver with NVIDIA's, I still had to restart my PC to produce the crash.
As for the strange stuttering issue, this one is hard to really define. To me it seems like I will always get stutters when I load or render something new for the first time, and the severity of the stutters can vary. After it happens, I can't reproduce that same stutter unless I restart the game. I can't always tell what causes the stutters that do happen, I just know they will occur but once the severe stutters are out of the way it's usually okay and I won't experience them again. This kind of behaviour reminds me of stutters you'd see with caching issues. Outside of the stuttering I also find it odd that my fps will dip under the cap frequently by 1-2 frames, regardless of what I cap my framerate to and what my GPU/CPU utilization is. This stuttering issue was pretty consistent with what I've described until I tried Lost Ark recently, and that game throws a lot of this out of the window. It just stutters in the same areas, every single time. And just like with every other game, I've tried my best to troubleshoot it by going through all available options even if it didn't make sense for that thing to be the cause. Lowering and raising settings, disabling and enabling various things like g-sync/v-sync, capping to different framerates, exiting out of several background programs like MSI Afterburner/RTSS/Logitech G Hub/Alienware Command Centre, and just generally scouring forums all over the internet for solutions that worked for others which never worked for me. I always hit the performance targets I expect for my system outside of these interferences, but obviously something just does not seem to be working properly. Temps are normal as well (in and outside of games), GPU is sitting around 32-36°C and CPU around 32°C during normal desktop use. Using the current worst case scenario I have with Lost Ark, I do not see GPU temp exceed 66°C and CPU temp varies a lot during the series of stutters but averages around 44-56°C.
In the past 2 years I have done 5 clean installations, tried switching power plan to High Performance and setting Power management mode to prefer maximum performance, used DDU countless times while trying many different NVIDIA drivers every time there was a new release, reseating my GPU, slotting the GPU into a different slot, plugging the DisplayPort cable into different slots, running the full ePSA diagnostics test through BIOS, cleaning my PC, using Memtest86, switching SATA configuration from RAID to AHCI and so on. I can't remember everything I've tried but this is what stands out to me right now. Unfortunately I don't have another PC I can try my GPU in, or another card to swap it out with. My plan with the most recent clean installation I did was to do one thing at a time and try to produce the crash every time I downloaded or updated something. On the first night, I avoided Windows updates and was just in the process of downloading all the programs I needed and adjusting settings and whatnot. Every time I changed even the smallest thing, I tried to see if the crash would happen. Everything was going fine and I couldn't replicate it until the next day when the instant I booted up my PC, Windows had already downloaded a long list of updates and that's when the crash appeared again. I don't know if that was somehow going to happen regardless just because I had restarted my PC or because one of those updates is causing the problem. I was still in the process of downloading my stuff back so I didn't have a game to test before this happened, but I wanted to test a game while knowing the crashing issue didn't exist so I could see if this is related in some way.
Thanks to anyone that gives this any time. It's tough to summarize due to how complex and unusual this is, and I've never been able to find information online regarding my specific issue. I'm open to any suggestions or ideas, I just need some help diagnosing this because otherwise I have no idea how to tackle it and I have already tried everything I could think of and anything I was able to find online.
Specs:
Alienware Aurora R7
Display - ASUS PG279Q
Starting with Event 4101 "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered", this one seems to occur almost every time I encounter any sort of video playback for the first time after booting up my computer. For some examples, if I open Steam and the front page has some kind of animated piece, my display will flash black and then recover after a few seconds. If I open Chrome and the page has some sponsored video playing, the same thing will happen. Weirdly enough, this has never happened while playing a game, but booting up some games does trigger this crash. If I open Valorant before encountering the issue, I will not be able to produce the crash and it will prevent it from happening until I boot up the PC again. If I open Halo Infinite, the opening sequence will trigger the crash. Again important to note that once it happens, I can't replicate the crash until I restart my PC. In the past this used to happen 100% of the time, but now it's a bit less consistent. I'm not sure why there are some instances where it won't crash, and I've tried to replicate exactly what I did during those sessions to see if there's something else that prevented it but again it's not consistent. A weird thing I could do with Chrome is open the tab that has the video playing and quickly switch to another tab before the page finishes loading, exit Chrome, open it again, and if I do it carefully enough it somehow prevents the crash from happening. It's really odd.
After this crash happens, there's some really weird things I see change. In NVCP, "Low Latency Mode" gets set to "Custom" and loses the option for "On". I get additional options under "Power management mode" that weren't there before, and I get an option under the "Global Settings" & "Program Settings" tabs that lets me choose my preference between the GTX 1080 and integrated graphics (Intel UHD 630). There's also a message above that drop down menu that notifies me about Windows now being responsible for selecting which one to use, and none of this is there before the crash happens. It will also switch over to another NVIDIA High Definition Audio device and the one that is used on startup becomes disabled. If I'm using Discord and this crash happens, it will ask me if I want to switch to that device as if a new device were plugged in. I have them both set at different volume settings so I know when this happens, but so far it's always done that. For a while it seemed like removing the Intel UHD 630 driver prevented this from happening, but I did eventually run into the crash again and Windows would always update the driver immediately. I tried to reproduce the crash with Microsoft's basic display adapter after using DDU and was unable to. Even after I replaced the basic driver with NVIDIA's, I still had to restart my PC to produce the crash.
As for the strange stuttering issue, this one is hard to really define. To me it seems like I will always get stutters when I load or render something new for the first time, and the severity of the stutters can vary. After it happens, I can't reproduce that same stutter unless I restart the game. I can't always tell what causes the stutters that do happen, I just know they will occur but once the severe stutters are out of the way it's usually okay and I won't experience them again. This kind of behaviour reminds me of stutters you'd see with caching issues. Outside of the stuttering I also find it odd that my fps will dip under the cap frequently by 1-2 frames, regardless of what I cap my framerate to and what my GPU/CPU utilization is. This stuttering issue was pretty consistent with what I've described until I tried Lost Ark recently, and that game throws a lot of this out of the window. It just stutters in the same areas, every single time. And just like with every other game, I've tried my best to troubleshoot it by going through all available options even if it didn't make sense for that thing to be the cause. Lowering and raising settings, disabling and enabling various things like g-sync/v-sync, capping to different framerates, exiting out of several background programs like MSI Afterburner/RTSS/Logitech G Hub/Alienware Command Centre, and just generally scouring forums all over the internet for solutions that worked for others which never worked for me. I always hit the performance targets I expect for my system outside of these interferences, but obviously something just does not seem to be working properly. Temps are normal as well (in and outside of games), GPU is sitting around 32-36°C and CPU around 32°C during normal desktop use. Using the current worst case scenario I have with Lost Ark, I do not see GPU temp exceed 66°C and CPU temp varies a lot during the series of stutters but averages around 44-56°C.
In the past 2 years I have done 5 clean installations, tried switching power plan to High Performance and setting Power management mode to prefer maximum performance, used DDU countless times while trying many different NVIDIA drivers every time there was a new release, reseating my GPU, slotting the GPU into a different slot, plugging the DisplayPort cable into different slots, running the full ePSA diagnostics test through BIOS, cleaning my PC, using Memtest86, switching SATA configuration from RAID to AHCI and so on. I can't remember everything I've tried but this is what stands out to me right now. Unfortunately I don't have another PC I can try my GPU in, or another card to swap it out with. My plan with the most recent clean installation I did was to do one thing at a time and try to produce the crash every time I downloaded or updated something. On the first night, I avoided Windows updates and was just in the process of downloading all the programs I needed and adjusting settings and whatnot. Every time I changed even the smallest thing, I tried to see if the crash would happen. Everything was going fine and I couldn't replicate it until the next day when the instant I booted up my PC, Windows had already downloaded a long list of updates and that's when the crash appeared again. I don't know if that was somehow going to happen regardless just because I had restarted my PC or because one of those updates is causing the problem. I was still in the process of downloading my stuff back so I didn't have a game to test before this happened, but I wanted to test a game while knowing the crashing issue didn't exist so I could see if this is related in some way.
Thanks to anyone that gives this any time. It's tough to summarize due to how complex and unusual this is, and I've never been able to find information online regarding my specific issue. I'm open to any suggestions or ideas, I just need some help diagnosing this because otherwise I have no idea how to tackle it and I have already tried everything I could think of and anything I was able to find online.
Specs:
Alienware Aurora R7
Display - ASUS PG279Q
- i7 8700k
- GTX 1080*
- 16 GB DDR4 2666MHz
- 2TB 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s
- Alienware 850 Watt PSU
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