Graphic card driver stopped responding -> Blue Death

[prozajik]

And here i am with another problem ^^. I am playing on alienware m15x, graphic card Nvidia GeForce 260M and i have to use old driver from 2009 in order to be able to play paintball.
Recently, i tried updating driver to see if the issue was gone, but it wasnt. Althought i dont get Blue Death anymore, paintball still times out after some time and i get full black screen in which i cant do anything. Before the blackscreen i can see error message which appears "The NVIDIA OpenGL driver lost connection with the display driver due to exceeding the Windows Time-Out limit and is unable to continue.". This message appears totally randomly, sometimes i can play for 10 mins, sometimes 1 hour.

So just to sum it up:
2009 driver = no problem
2010 driver = instant blue death after random time
2011 driver = few times, paintball crashes with error message saying "Driver #version# stopped responding...", after like 1-4 these crashes i get blue death and only blue death after.
2012 driver = same as 2011
2013 driver = paintball crashes, writes error message i posted above and after like 1 minute i get black screen after which i have to "Hard restart" computer.
I went through countless of forums, tried many possible solutions, but nothing helped it.

This happens ONLY with paintball i played tons of games with the new driver and none caused blue death (ye i didnt play paintball because of that and just played GTA IV for example, because without newest drivers, GTA wasnt even barely playable).
I tried reinstalling computer aswell like 3+ times.

PS:Just today i tried "Microsoft Fix It", which should change registry values for Graphic card times out or w/e. On Nvidia page they say it should help. I would be really surprised if it does actually help, because this issue wasnt adressed for at least 2 years and they stopped developing m15x with this GPU long time ago (this issue had few other people aswell, not with pb but some other games/apps, nobody was able to find any solution tho and the issue was specifically with m15x).

[jitspoe]

Do you play any other games that use OpenGL?

[ViciouZ]

Assuming you are at 1000fps most of the time, try setting "cl_sleep 4", graphics cards these days really don't seem to like paintball when it's running at stupid speed.

[prozajik]

Do you play any other games that use OpenGL?

Well, honestly i have no idea. Probably not. At least not the extend that i could test it, i usually just stick with the driver which worked for pb and played other games with it.

Assuming you are at 1000fps most of the time, try setting "cl_sleep 4", graphics cards these days really don't seem to like paintball when it's running at stupid speed.

Mhhm, just reinstalled to the 2009 driver because my pb crashed -.-. I think that actually might be it, i am running on 1000fps like all the time, if i disable "transparent water" it doesnt even decrease. I will put back the newest driver and try it out.

EDIT:Just trying it out, srsly Viciouz, this is first time that some solution to this actually makes sense to me.
EDIT2:Is cl_sleep 4 just cl_maxfps 250? Or Does it have some higher meaning? ^^
EDIT3:Still crashes! But this time i didnt get black screen, after pb crashed with OpenGL error i could still use browser etc.

[ViciouZ]

cl_sleep 4 makes the CPU wait 4 milliseconds after a frame, which means there is a limit of 250fps, but it's not quite the same as cl_maxfps 250. You could try cl_maxfps 250 instead if you want, I'm not sure it has the exact same effect. Personally I use cl_maxfps 59, 60hz refresh rate and gl_swapinterval 1 which gives me no screen tearing and no mouse lag.

Either way, sorry to hear it still crashes :/

[prozajik]

Mehh, when i instal old driver it says "Your graphic card driver doesnt support OpenGL", it worked before tho, any ideas on how to get pass it?

[jitspoe]

What's the actual blue screen message you were getting?  Can you write it down or take a picture or something?  Perhaps searching for that message will help find a solution to the problem.

[prozajik]

Well i didnt get it for quite some time, because i basically ran the old driver and didn't give a darn. THe problem is, I cant do it now (maybe some changes since Build +-31 in checking OpenGL compatibility?), because it just tells me, my GPU doesnt support OpenGL.
As for the blue screen picture, i had it and i tried to search for it, i reinstalled my pc few times tho, so i dont have it now. But as far as i remember, it was some directx .dll crashing.

I tried searching for it obviously, but as i said, not many users had this issue as this issue is most common with m15x users and after that, only few people who have the same GPU. I stumbled upon only few forums who talked about this Blue screen, even one that had 100+ pages, but nobody was able to come up with some solution which would work for everyone.

So, I guess I am not actually asking for solution here, but a way to get around the OpenGL check, because it worked before.

Although i have noticed some improvement after using Viciouz suggestion (cl_sleep 4), I was able to finish the weekend tournament without any crash (It just maybe might have been fixed because i was running pb for quite some time, but i still have to give it a try).

PS:I am pretty positive my GPU isnt overheating, because if you ever saw alienwares inside you would know why i think so ^^.

[jitspoe]

It's strange that you would get this error with an nvidia card, as the drivers tend to support OpenGL pretty well, though it might be something specific to the mobile version (in general, laptop video cards tend to not be supported as well).  Where are you getting the drivers from?  Directly from nVidia's site?

Having an error about directx seems suspicious, since the game uses OpenGL.  Maybe you had some kind of wrapper DLL, and that's how you were avoiding the OpenGL error?

The OpenGL check hasn't changed in a long time.  Basically all it does is check to make sure you're not using the microsoft software renderer.  You can set gl_allow_software to 1, and it will allow the game to run without popping up the message, but it will be insanely slow.

If I remember correctly, Alienwares are actually notorious for overheating, so don't rule it out just because there are a lot of fans.  I think they overclock their components by default as well, so you may need to clock some stuff down to make it more stable.

[prozajik]

Hmm, thats rly weird, because it worked for me like 1-2 years ago without any message. I used drivers from dell.com (alienware manufacteur) which were specifially for m15x. The lastest drivers gave me same message from dell as they did from nvidia (talking like 1 year ago, not now, now it just crashes and black screen). The only diver which worked fine, was the 2009 one from dell.com site.

I didnt use any external .dll which would avoid the message (at least not intentionally). It might have been left there from some of the GPU driver instalation, because i tried like all the versions.

Honestly, from all the notebooks i had, alienware never got that hot, that it could burn my hand. THere is not that many fans honestly, there is like plate of steel which is attached directly to processor and GPU and leads all the heat to the fans ^^.

[prozajik]

Looks like i finally found a solution, this problem seems to be common for GeForce GTX 200(M) series, i have 260M so that would explain it. The actual BlueDeath error was nvlddmkm.sys, i got it today when watching some film so i went on internet and searched for it. Turns out, they released official fix for this (at least i hope this helps, looks really promising and actually goes along suggestion Viciouz made). They suggested to lower the clocks on GPU by 10 and 20 and that should do the trick.
So, i will let you know how it turned out just with edit i guess.

The actual fix is here http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/362527-33-nvlddmkm-official


EDIT:I think i found out the problem, surprisingly, my GPU was somehow overclocked pretty hard (never even had any program which could do it until now). Maybe it was overclocked from manufacteur, dunno. The important thing is that i had 930 Mhz Memory clock while default is 800. So i underclocked it to 780 as they suggested in the link to decrease it by 20 from default. I did the same for Core clock and will see where this takes me.
I hope this works, because i have been running into these errors while using my pc without any heavy perfomance requirements (just watching youtube on 480p).