Video Games crashing when PC is hooked up to my TV

[brokenbirthday]

So this is weird, or at least I've never ran into a problem like this before. Yesterday, I dot the idea to hook my PC up to my living room TV to play Dark Souls (because you can only play it with a controller and I wanted to chill on the couch).

So I was playing Dark Souls for about 20 when it crashed. It just froze up and the little window popped up that says something along the lines of "Such-and-Such has stopped working. Windows is searching for a solution". You know, the general "this application died and there's nothing we can do" window. So I thought it was weird but maybe it was just an anomaly, Windows likes to goof around. I started Dark Souls back up and after about 10 to 20 minutes it did it again. After a couple more unsuccessful tries, I decided to try a different game. And it happened again. I went through about 7 or 8 games and they all crashed. I was becoming incredibly worried at this point, doing everything I could think of. Running hardware monitor logs while the games are crashing to see if anything is getting unusually hot, resetting the Nvidia Control Panel settings, etc... I tried everything I could think of to no avail. Games kept crashing after about 10 to 20 minutes of play. No other applications had any problems, I watched video streams, played around in FL Studio. No problems except while gaming.

Anyway, after a day of wrestling my PC and getting increasingly worried, I decided to take it back to desk and hook it back up to my monitor. Once I did, I tried playing games again. And they were fine. I played Dark Souls and Warframe a few hours each today. No problems at all.

After my long-winded story, my question is pretty much "what the hell?" How would a TV vs. a monitor have any affect on how the games played, and only games? And are there any solutions? Does anyone have any experience with this problem?

My TV is a 1080p LCD Sony Bravia hooked up using HDMI. My monitor is a 1080p LED Asus hooked up through DVI-D. I have Windows 8 (unfortunately) and I think the rest of my important hardware info is in my signature. I think... we'll see after this is posted...

And thanks in advance for any help at all.

 

[Zenkor]

Sounds like a driver issue.

 

[brokenbirthday]

Sounds like a driver issue.

Possibly. I tried rolling back the drivers and that didn't help. And then I reinstalled the current one again. But it could just be that all the newer Nvidia drivers have a problem.

 

[Tom Tancredi]

I had a similar run in with HDMI and DVI-D, which is two different types of connection bandwidths. Normally if your running DVI-D (to get 1080P) your 'pipe' had enough to carry that to screen, but HDMI doesn't have enough (normally) for that from a PC Video Card (totally different with a PS3/XBOX HDMI cable). You can 'overload' but then you hit a break point and it crashes it. That would be my first diagnosis.

My second would be HDMI carries audio over the cable, where as DVI-D does not normally (though can) carry audio too. This is part of the NVIDIA Audio driver also included. This maybe crashing (break point) as well after a while.

 

[Zenkor]

Windows generally uses a generic driver for the monitor/tv, maybe it isn't compatible with your tv or is corrupted.

 

[Zenkor]

I had a similar run in with HDMI and DVI-D, which is two different types of connection bandwidths. Normally if your running DVI-D (to get 1080P) your 'pipe' had enough to carry that to screen, but HDMI doesn't have enough (normally) for that from a PC Video Card (totally different with a PS3/XBOX HDMI cable). You can 'overload' but then you hit a break point and it crashes it. That would be my first diagnosis.

My second would be HDMI carries audio over the cable, where as DVI-D does not normally (though can) carry audio too. This is part of the NVIDIA Audio driver also included. This maybe crashing (break point) as well after a while.

Hmmm, could be a faulty cable. I am currently running my 1920x1200 monitor with an HDMI cable for video and sound. I can play any video game without issue.

 

[brokenbirthday]

I had a similar run in with HDMI and DVI-D, which is two different types of connection bandwidths. Normally if your running DVI-D (to get 1080P) your 'pipe' had enough to carry that to screen, but HDMI doesn't have enough (normally) for that from a PC Video Card (totally different with a PS3/XBOX HDMI cable). You can 'overload' but then you hit a break point and it crashes it. That would be my first diagnosis.

My second would be HDMI carries audio over the cable, where as DVI-D does not normally (though can) carry audio too. This is part of the NVIDIA Audio driver also included. This maybe crashing (break point) as well after a while.

Well, holy shit. Thank you. I don't know why I didn't think of the Nvidia audio driver. I kept thinking if it was a driver, then it must be the video driver, but I neglected to check the audio driver. I never thought about it before, but it makes sense. When the PC is hooked up to my monitor, I use the generic Windows audio driver for my speakers. But it uses the Nvidia audio driver when the audio is being transmitted through video card's HDMI port.

So this morning I reinstalled the Nvidia audio driver and now it's working perfectly. I wish I had thought of this before. So, thank you, Sir, for noticing my negligence. You are a gentleman and a scholar worthy of annual Christmas cards. And thank you to everyone else that tried to help. =)