The display driver AMD has stopped working and has recovered

[emtr]

After the patch upgrade I am unable to play the games Starcraft II (WoL and HotS beta) and use the Editor. I think only on the first hours after the patch I was able to Log in to Battle Net and use the Editor. Then here is what happened:

If I try to enter WoL - I did a fresh reinstallation (100% installed to 14GB), I get glitches/lines either on loading screen:

http://i.imgur.com/0x6TIw0.jpg

If I am able to close SC2 before it freezes and requires hard restart, I get this error:

The display driver AMD has stopped working and has recovered.

My system:
Alienware M17
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 M88 XT, 512 MB
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.23 GHz
3 GB DDR3 memory
Win 7 Home Premium x64
Resolution: 1440x900 or 1024x768 didn't make a difference

According to the game's new requirements "SLIGHTLY" (according to them...) increased:

https://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/starcraft-ii-system-requirements?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=support_forums&utm_campaign=BlizzardCSEU

And my specs, can I play it? Before that I could even High settings, now can't even Low which is 2 levels below (High-Medium-Low)

I've went to Control Catalyst Center and from what I read on the internet... LCD Overdrive should be ticked and set to high to increase the clock speed and I STILL get the same issue. How to fix it?

I want to run the game even on Low settings just to be able to run it..

 

[emtr]

How can I completely stop the driver from going down and recovering, etc? Every time I try to do this, the freeze, glitches and lines, unfreeze when recovering, minutes later freeze again happens when this message appears..

 

[emtr]

...

So it loads the Loading Screen, becomes again in such white lines and after it restarts fixes itself during the Loading, once entering game - starts pixelating again and freezes, I lowered graphics to minimum all...

If I eliminate this 'stopped working and recovering' it might work.. newest or previous driver doesnt change a thing..

 

[emtr]

 

[full_out]

Is it just starcraft? Or all games?

 

[emtr]

Well I don't have any other 3d games with such requirements to compare, whether other 3d games do so but:

- Browsing the internet, watching videos HD, youtube, playing 2D game with 256 colors but dynamically at 1280x960 resolution - are NO PROBLEM

As of latest patch they increased requirements but according to them ATI™ Radeon™ X800 XT 256MB is minimum, with 512MB I was able to go High Settings, now I can't even Low (High-Medium-Low) that is 2 levels below.

https://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/starcraft-ii-system-requirements?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=support_forums&utm_campaign=BlizzardCSEU

Is it normal 512MB to be insufficient? If it doesn't restart cause AMD driver stopped working, I may not be getting freeze, cause right now it just freezes as in the above pic

 

[full_out]

It looks like your system is "good enough". The driver crashing is odd. What I would do just to get rid of any junky drivers and eliminate anything random and weird, is just give the computer a good ol' format and re install windows. When was the last time you did that? I tend to do it every 6 months or so just to get rid of the garbage that piles up.

 

[full_out]

Have you physically cleaned out the laptop in a while? She might be getting hot.

 

[emtr]

Ok so it's not only SC2. I had to do work on war3 bringing some stuff from the editor and when I increased the graphics to high and 'viewed entire map' which kind of needs more resources when you view the entire map, again got such lines, freezes and failure (the game from 2003 is with much lower specs than SC2). It can even happen on the gimp after editing images for hours. Only regular things such as videos, internet work fine but that hardly requires much graphics...

willl try a reinstallation of Win7 to see if it helps, though if it is the card, I doubt, I reinstalled win 7 around 1 year and 7 months ago but I never installed too many things, so I doubt it is windows.

 

[full_out]

Did you check to see if it is nice and clean inside? Maybe when the resolution gets high, it starts to get to hot, then starts failing.

 

[Scorp90]

I am having the same issue and its really pissing me off.

my specs.
intel i5 quad core 3.4ghz
radeon HD 7850
16gb ram 1600mgz
windows 7 sp1 64 bit

I am about to switch to nvidia. From what I have read on this issue with ati, ive seen posts from 5 years ago all the way up until now.

I clean the inside of my pc once a month and monitor my temps and fan speeds so thats not the issue.

I have used driversweeper and reinstalled the drivers.
Nothing is working.

Conclusion. AMD blows

 

[emtr]

^ It can happen with Nvidia I've heard as well but this seems to be common with AMD, since the error message is about AMD/ATI drivers...

Did you check to see if it is nice and clean inside? Maybe when the resolution gets high, it starts to get to hot, then starts failing.

No, I have not opened my laptop since I bought it in 2008. It cannot be the heating because the fan is working, and I can get these lines in the first minutes of turning the laptop on if I load the graphics with a 3D game or even image editing on Gimp - meaning from completely cooled state. Resolution lowered to 1080x768 or so, did nothing.

It seems ATI HD3870 has always been a crappy card, since in the past years I could hear the fan going quite fast when you overload the graphics a little more, and the laptop was having the needed game specs and requirements.

Not only did I lower Graphics to Low... I set the FPS to 3 FPS! And even though it loads faster, the white lines or colors, restart, AMD driver has recovered, play 1 second, freeze and colors or white lines appear - this freaking restart cannot be kicked it seems, if it didnt happen, it would be at least playable..

 

[disaster999]

I have the same issue when playing the new Simcity. The game will load up in the menu and its fine, but when I start building a city, it will constantly crash and recover. Sometimes it will just plain crash and my game will freeze up. This only happens with Simcity and nothing else.

Im running a Shuttle XPC with AMD Athlon X2 6000+ 3.0ghz dual core
6gb of ram
MSI R7770 GHz edition display card.
Catalyst 13.1 (13.2 beta will still crash the game)

My laptop running i5 2.53ghz and a GT300m display card with 4gb of ram and it runs the game fine.

 

[emtr]

This only happens with Simcity and nothing else.

I also thought it is SC2 but when I tried it in War3 which is now an old game some ppl can run even on their newest phones.. it's not the game.

Also when I am without a driver - such as when I reinstalled the driver or if I ran Safe Mode - if I dont use the driver I get Lines and Squares on WINDOWS as well..., and yes even some internet sites (my bet is if they overload the card) may cause the same at least once.

In SC2 however, I can't even play, it restarts every 5 seconds until it gives BSOD or simply freezes to require hard restart.

My question out of the whole thing is: Is there ANY way to prevent these restarts from happening? To not allow it to restart?? I tried:

- LCD overdrive in ATI CCC has no effect
- tried to decrease the timeout in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\VIDEO\MaxObjectNumber REG_DWORD to be 0x00000000 instead of 0x00000005 but nothing, only restarts the display with 'AMD driver stopped working... successfully restored'. And after PC restart the reg gets back to 5 i.e 00000005

If I stop the constant restarts I may be able to do something.. that's what I need to stop. HOW TO DO THAT?

 

[full_out]

Maybe your 4 year old laptop is just on its way out and the hardware is failing...

 

[TheQuickCook]

DONOT HIBERNATE

I was having similar issues in my Vaio, with ATI Radeon HD 5650 1GB. I tried running temperature tests, driver updates, Memtest for RAM and even a full wipe of Win 7. Nothing seemed to be working. And then one fine day I noticed, when my system woke up from hibernation, the performance was so bad. with full choppy display and BSOD over BSOD. So i went to the power options and DISABLED all HIBERNATION actions. Even for the critical battery action i put the action as "shutdown" and not hibernate.

So my solution is to check all your power option settings and if there is any action to "hibernate" change it. To "shutdown" preferably. I hope this will help.