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Windows TDR resetting video card when multiboxing

Moderator: MiRai

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mrmagoo

Posts: 61

Joined: Tue Jul 16, 2013 6:01 am

Post Mon Aug 12, 2013 2:15 am

Windows TDR resetting video card when multiboxing

Setup

OS: Windows 7 (applies to vista sp1 and later)
Game: Rift
Setup: 5 chars, 2 monitors
CPU: i7
GPU: HD Radeon 7750
Power: Thermaltake 600w
Graphics setup: 1 character set to low graphics settings as the main. 4 Slaves in low performance mode with all settings minimised.

Problem

Tried a "new" card in my system to upgrade from my pathetic Radeon HD 4--- series card. Was surprised when the same configuration my old card handled with no trouble caused the card to freeze and windows to reset the card (sometimes continuously). Even with no overclocking and even with all card settings at a minimum.
This would happen randomly when I loaded more than one character up with innerspace in Rift. On occasion it would run without issue for hours and often happen even before I had all the characters loaded up. Very strange. If you close all the windows and restart them after hours of trouble free playing....bang. And once it has happened there is no recovering from it. It would happen around 50% of the time.

The main symptom is that the screen would freeze and come back again. A windows popup in the taskbar would read: "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered". (i.e. Windows TDR)
Sometimes it would keep doing this and never recover and require a reboot.
In certain situations the computer would blue screen with error code: STOP: ...0x116.
(NB: Turns out this blue screen occurs is when TDR resets happens more than 5 times or lasts more than 60 seconds by default)

Random flailings of a very mad scientist

This was a very weird problem and I got all scientifical experiment on its ass to try and troubleshoot it.
At no time did the card or CPU get above 45 degrees or was there any other strangeness. Even in the Rift scenarios the only strangeness was the resetting.
Only when I ran 3 or more Rifts/NWs in innerspace was there a problem.

After much research, many reboots and many many hours later these are my findings:

I tried a lot of things that did not work to fix this including but not limited to:
  • Upping "available power" to card (cannot change voltage on this one) without overclocking - caused blue screens instead of resets!?
  • Underclocking card - only made it worse.
  • Used the Unigine Heaven benchmark and assaulted the card - ran fine.
  • Tried a more insane benchmark and ran 5 instances of Heaven at resolutions similar to my chars - ran fine.
  • Bumped up settings to "insane mad scientist mode" on benchmark and ran 5 instances again - ran fine.
  • Ran a single copy of rift inside innerspace and ran 4 copies of mad scientist benchmark in background - ran fine.
  • Ran two copies of rift in innerspace with all settings maxed and FPS limiters off - ran fine.
  • As above with some benchmarks in the background to the point where all 2 gig of the poor little cards memory was used up and cpu at 99% continuous- ran fine??!
  • Adjusted TDR or "Timeout Detection Recovery" since this was what triggered the card resets. No dice, card is actually locking up.
  • Fired up and configured Neverwinter for 5 box mode. Everything went fine (by chance?) until setup regions the same as for Rift...BOOM.
  • Removed overlaps from both Rift and NW and restarted clients multiple times each...failed.
  • Used the default configuration for Neverboxer without any window modifications...failed
  • Loaded the Heaven benchmark in 5 ISboxer windows 5 times....all succeeded.



Not sure where to go now. The last ran fine but then the way the heaven benchmark works is probably different to a game.

I have a second hand (but different) video card in the mail that will hopefully turn up tomorrow. I will run all the slaves off it and see if that solves the problem.

Until then I will try playing a 3d game solo to see if there are any lock ups. I could try returning the card under warranty as "faulty" but if they test it they will see what I did - the card performs fine in normal scenarios.
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MiRai

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Post Mon Aug 12, 2013 9:15 am

Re: Windows TDR resetting video card when multiboxing

TDRs and blue screens are going to be caused by the driver or the hardward and I don't see any mention anything about which version you're using, where you're downloading it from, and if you've tried newer/older releases. You also didn't mention whether you reinstalled the driver when you swapped cards -- Which is usually good practice, even if it's the same exact driver.

I'm definitely unfamiliar with the AMD side of things, but this happens all the time where a new nVidia driver will cause me to crash more than the last one did, so I'll revert back to the old driver and everything is fine. In fact, I usually don't even bother to upgrade my drivers unless I'm clearly having an issue and a newer driver may actually fix the problem or, it's been quite some time since I upgraded. It's usually rare that you would need to be on the latest and greatest version of the driver when using a desktop machine (at least in my experience), so my advice would be that you need to start choosing a handf.

Worst case scenario? Your PSU is unable to provide the GPU with the power needed. If the PSU is flaky and providing unstable power at random times then this could easily cause the weird GPU behavior that you're seeing.
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RSM72

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Post Mon Aug 12, 2013 10:31 am

Re: Windows TDR resetting video card when multiboxing

The 7750 is probably a problem - last year when I put research in how to upgrade my wifes pc I stumbled upon that card as it was the only one not needing a separate power connector on the PSU. This could turn out as a problem because rift is probably causing to much stress to the card.

Also be aware that most drivers today take measures (be it underclocking or messing with the voltage) to prevent hardware from being killed in benchmarks. So 5x Heaven benchmark probably did alot less load compared to 5 instances of any given game.
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mrmagoo

Posts: 61

Joined: Tue Jul 16, 2013 6:01 am

Post Mon Aug 12, 2013 4:29 pm

Re: Windows TDR resetting video card when multiboxing

MiRai wrote:TDRs and blue screens are going to be caused by the driver or the hardward and I don't see any mention anything about which version you're using, where you're downloading it from, and if you've tried newer/older releases. You also didn't mention whether you reinstalled the driver when you swapped cards -- Which is usually good practice, even if it's the same exact driver. [...]

Sorry about that, I did write it in at one stage but must have lost it in the draft I was creating over several days. I purposefully tried to include all the standard/simple stuff I knew people would bring up and I had already looked into - powersupply, cpu etc. Annoyed I missed this one.
I have tried the latest drivers (13.4) and the beta drivers from the AMD website. No difference. The existing drivers would not have worked anyway as the 4 series use the legacy ones. (hence why I cannot use my old card as a secondary)
I used both driver sweeper AND CC Cleaner after cleaning the system AND the system was a fresh install as well.

What I have not tried it reverting back to an earlier driver than 13.4. I hear what you are saying about not needing the absolute latests and greatest in all cases but occasionally they do fix compatibility and performance issues so it is usually best to have those. I will try anyway since I have some time today. (I am on NZST so different to you guys most likely)

MiRai wrote:Worst case scenario? Your PSU is unable to provide the GPU with the power needed. If the PSU is flaky and providing unstable power at random times then this could easily cause the weird GPU behavior that you're seeing.

While possible I very much doubt this. This card does not require an external power supply AND I have a 600 watt thermaltake. Also the card I used to have used more power than this one.
Last edited by mrmagoo on Mon Aug 12, 2013 5:19 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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mrmagoo

Posts: 61

Joined: Tue Jul 16, 2013 6:01 am

Post Mon Aug 12, 2013 4:45 pm

Re: Windows TDR resetting video card when multiboxing

RSM72 wrote:The 7750 is probably a problem - last year when I put research in how to upgrade my wifes pc I stumbled upon that card as it was the only one not needing a separate power connector on the PSU. This could turn out as a problem because rift is probably causing to much stress to the card.

Also be aware that most drivers today take measures (be it underclocking or messing with the voltage) to prevent hardware from being killed in benchmarks. So 5x Heaven benchmark probably did a lot less load compared to 5 instances of any given game.


Thanks a lot for this. I knew that the 5-slot heaven was not an exact measure as I mentioned and you are likely right about the jiggery pokery - I have read about it. I will do some research on another test that may get around this. Do you know of any?
The main purpose behind the heaven tests was to max out memory and CPU to try and see if the card itself was faulty in some obvious way such as a bad memory chip etc. (something else I have read about)

What is interesting is that the freezes can occur before even all 5 chars are up and running. However it is possible that there is a GPU spike in there somewhere anyway. Also allowing the card 20% more power made the problem worse. (i.e. blue screens)

So thanks for this guys you have given me some new ideas! :)

So what I will do:
* Test the card with older drivers after a full driver clean. [failed]
* Test with some other non-standard benchmark test if I can find it [tried many non-mainstream ones of various sorts, all worked ok even though the card was thrashed to hell]
* Test the setup with the older card only - it uses the same drivers and should perform well enough to handle 5 clients.
* Test the setup with the secondary card which will hopefully (fingers crossed) turn up this afternoon on the courier.
* Bang the card back as faulty if any of the above don't fix the problem for me or I find that the card is actually faulty.
Last edited by mrmagoo on Mon Aug 12, 2013 7:08 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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MiRai

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Post Mon Aug 12, 2013 5:27 pm

Re: Windows TDR resetting video card when multiboxing

mrmagoo wrote:
MiRai wrote:Worst case scenario? Your PSU is unable to provide the GPU with the power needed. If the PSU is flaky and providing unstable power at random times then this could easily cause the weird GPU behavior that you're seeing.

While possible I very much doubt this. This card does not require an external power supply AND I have a 600 watt thermaltake. Also the card I used to have used more power than this one.

Errr... I hadn't looked up the card before you said this. If it's not a driver issue, then I'm going to agree with RSM72 and say it's probably the card itself because the 7750 is not very powerful by any means and RIFT is resource heavy -- A mid/top-end single-GPU card from over 2 years ago is still able to easily outperform a 7750 by 2-3x.

If you're on a budget, then you're on a budget, but if I had to guess after doing a quick comparison of nVidia and AMD GPUs, you'd want at the very least a 7850 for some decent performance.
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mrmagoo

Posts: 61

Joined: Tue Jul 16, 2013 6:01 am

Post Mon Aug 12, 2013 5:48 pm

Re: Windows TDR resetting video card when multiboxing

Yes I am or to put it in a non-pc way: I am so broken-ass I can barely take a dump... :mrgreen:

This was the best card I could afford. If I return it I may try to go for a "better" card with more juice (i.e. additional power supply) but the card you listed there is twice the price unfortunately. Its just not going to happen.

I understand I cannot get "great" performance and was even ok with the low performance of my old card but I would be happy with "not destroying my computer" at this point! :shock:
If it is just the card being overloaded then the freebie I have nabbed from a friend may very well take the load off this card and make everything hunky dory. In fact that would be just peachy because the card actually looks and performs amicably (albeit by my broken-ass standards) when run solo. I hope so.

First boot up with old drivers has worked. Might just be chance. Will roll the dice again! :)
Nope. Crash city...
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mrmagoo

Posts: 61

Joined: Tue Jul 16, 2013 6:01 am

Post Wed Aug 14, 2013 12:10 am

Re: Windows TDR resetting video card when multiboxing

Ok. New old card is in and all is hunky dory now I have both GPUs engaged. (had issues with this until I recreated my windows layouts)

Ref: http://isboxer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2588&start=10

Setup works amazingly well considering the junk I am running it on. :)

Very pleased as punch. :mrgreen:


Thanks so much for the help guys!
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mrmagoo

Posts: 61

Joined: Tue Jul 16, 2013 6:01 am

Post Tue Aug 20, 2013 2:42 pm

Re: Windows TDR resetting video card when multiboxing

Closure update for anyone with similar problems in the future.

Had a few lockups unfortunately. Not nearly as frequent or as bad and 99% of the time it is just a plain old reset and the system recovers.

Found a benchmark/burn-in tool called OCCT (http://www.ocbase.com/) which I tried. It is an amazing tool for this sort of thing. It would cause the problem 1/3 times (unlike any of the standard benchmarks) and has an calculation error checking mechanism which can verify if the GPU is doing its maths correctly.

And......it found millions of errors even when the card did not lock up. And this was on non small windowed, low shader tests also.


So armed with this screenshot I have flung the card back at the manufacturer.(yay!) NZ has pretty awesome consumer laws so while he will drag his feet as they always try and do mentioning the "commerce commission" usually puts the fear of god into them.

I have saved up some additional money in the meantime and will be purchasing a much better card this time as well.

Looking at a 7870 based on your recommendations. It is a full 20 magic numbers bigger than the 7850 so that means it will be 20/7850 = 0.25% better right!? ;)

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