9 Fixes to Display Driver Stopped Responding and Has Recovered

Some of you may have encountered this situation: when you are playing computer games or running an application on your computer, it freezes up a few seconds or exit it to the desktop. Sometimes the computer is stuck in a blue screen of death or goes black. After a few seconds, a notification as below will show up at the right corner of the computer screen.

You will see the message “display driver has stopped responding and has recovered”. It is really annoying if you are doing something urgent at that time. You may wonder: how did this happen? How can I fix it? Well, the following contents will tell you when this phenomenon would occur and the specific steps to fix it.

When Would “Display Driver Stopped Responding and Has Recovered” Error Occur

The reasons for error “Display Driver Stopped Responding and Has Recovered Nvidia” are various and complicated. Here I summarize some occasions that the display driver stopped responding error would occur at its great possibility.

• There are a lot of programs and applications running on your computer.
• The display drive is outdated, corrupted or missing.
• The GPU in your computer is overheating.
• GPU takes more time than permitted to display graphics to your monitor.
• The graphic card in your computer is very old or defective.
• Windows operating system has corrupt system or registry files.

After learning the possible causes for the Display Driver Stopped Responding and Has Recovered Nvidia error, you should now apply a solution to solve it.

1. Close unnecessary programs and applications
2. Change visual effects 
3. Reinstall graphics drivers
4. Increase GPU processing time
5. Update the graphics driver
6. Check if the GPU is overheating
7. Configure Hardware to default settings
8. Replace the graphic card with a new one

Solution 1. Close Unnecessary Programs and Applications

When there are more applications and programs than the GPU can handle running, performance issues like “Display Driver Stopped Responding and Has Recovered” error could be triggered.

In this case, you can close some unnecessary applications and programs running on your computer, which should fix display driver has stopped responding issue.

Solution 2. Adjust Visual Effects for Better Performance

Adjusting visual effect can also help to improve computer performance and fix display driver stopped responding and has recovered Windows 10 error. You can adjust your computer for better performance by disabling some of the visual effects. Here are detailed steps and pictures to show you how to adjust visual effects in Windows 10.

Step 1. Input Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows in the Windows Cortana search box and choose the best match to open the Performance options.

Step 2. In this Visual Effect section, select Adjust for best performance and click OK.

Step 3. Close the windows and check if display driver has stopped responding issue has been fixed.

If this method did not resolve the Windows 10 display driver stopped responding and has recovered issue, you may try the next method.

Solution 3. Uninstall and Reinstall Graphics Drivers

Step 1. Right-click Windows Start menu and choose Run.

Step 2. Input devmgmt.msc into the Run dialog and press Enter to launch the Device Manager.

Step 3. Find Display adapters in the Device Manager and expand it.

Step 4. Right-click on your graphics drivers, click on Uninstall to uninstall the drivers. If you have more than one graphics driver, them uninstall them one by one.

Step 5. Restart your computer. When your computer starts up successfully, Windows will automatically reinstall the same version of the graphics drivers.

Solution 4. Increase GPU Processing Time

You can resolve the “Display drive stopped responding and has recovered Nvidia” issue by simply increasing the TDR (Timeout Detection & Recovery) timeout for your GPU, and this can be done by editing your computer’s registry. Now, follow the detailed steps.

Step 1. Exit all Windows based programs.

Step 2. Input regedit in the Windows 10 Cortana search box.

Step 3. Go to the following directory.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Control > GraphicsDrivers

Step 4. In the right pane, right-click on an empty space and click New to expand the context menu. If you are using a 32-bit operating system, choose DWORD (32-bit) Value in the context menu. If you are using a 64-bit operating system, click on QWORD (64-bit) Value in the context menu.

Step 5. Name the new registry value TdrDelay and press Enter.

Step 6. Double-click on the TdrDelay registry value to modify it. Then input 8 into its Value data box and click on OK.

Step 7. Close the Registry Editor and restart your computer to see if display driver stopped responding and has recovered windows 10 error is fixed.

Tips: If you modify the registry incorrectly, it could cause serious problem on your computer. If there is something wrong with your computer, you can delete the added TdrDelay and restart your computer.

Solution 5. Update Your Graphics Drivers

If a newer version of the graphics drivers on your computer is available for your computer, you can download and install them, which may be able to fix “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered Nvidia” error.

To check to see if a newer version of your computer’s graphics drivers is available, you can follow the steps as below.

Step 1. Go to the official website of your GPU’s manufacturer. If you don’t know the type of your GPU, you can follow the steps in Solution 3 to find it out.

Step 2. Search if a newer version of your computer’s graphics drivers is available.

Step 3. If there is a version available, download and install it on your computer. And this should solve your problem.

If you find that this is a little complicated for you or you don’t have the time, patience to update the driver by yourself, you can also resort to a third-party driver update software to update your drivers automatically, which is very convenient. Be sure to choose a reliable one.

Solution 6. Check if GPU Is Overheating

Overheating GPU may cause the Windows 10 display driver stopped responding and has recovered issue. The temperature of your graphic card should not go beyond its maximum operating temperature.

Generally speaking, if the temperature of the GPU is around or above 80° C, it may cause driver crash and then give you the notification “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered”. In this case, you can use a temperature monitor program to check your GPU temperature and make sure the temperature is not too high.

Besides, the GPU is easy to get overheating if the radiator is dusted. So you can shut down your computer, take it out, clean some impurities and dust on the GPU radiator and see if the display driver has stopped responding and has recovered problem resolves.

Solution 7. Set Hardware to Default Settings

If you get the display driver stop responding issue after overclocking CPU, Memory or GPU, you can try to run all hardware components at their default settings to see if that helps.

Solution 8. Reinstall Windows Operating System

If your Windows operating system has corrupt system files or registry files, it may cause the “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered” issue. Some users also said that display driver has stopped responding and has recovered Windows 10 error has only happened to them after upgrading Windows 10.

See: Should I Upgrade To Windows 10 – How To Decide

In this case, you can do a clean install of Windows 10 to solve this issue. Before your start reinstallation, remember to backup the disk, as reinstallation will delete your data.

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The fastest way to backup all important files is to backup the whole disk with a disk cloning software. But if you don’t have that much space to store all the data on your disk, you can also bakcup the partition that you have stored important files.

To backup partition or disk, it is recommended to use MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Ultimate Edition as it is a professional partition manager as well as disk cloning software trusted by tens of millions of people. Using MiniTool Partition Wizard can not only help you backup partition and disk but also help you format partition, resize partition, check file system, convert MBR disk to GPT. Now let’s see detailed steps to backup disk and reinstall Windows 10.

Step 1. Get MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Ultimate Edition by clicking the following button. Install it on your computer and launch it to get the main interface.

Step 2. Then choose Copy Disk from the left action panel.

Step 3. Choose a disk to copy the source content to and click Next. And click Yes on the pop-up window to continue. All the data on the target disk will be destroyed, so make sure there is no important file on the disk or you have made backups in advance.

Step 4. Here you can change the copy options by yourself if necessary. And you can also change the partition size by dragging the handle bar. Then click Next to continue.

Step 5. Read the note about how to boot from the destination hard drives if you are cloning a system disk. Then click Finish.

Step 6. In this page, you can preview the changes. At last, you need to click Apply to allow the pending operations.

Now, follow the steps as below to perform a clean install of Windows 10.

Step 1. Create a Windows 10 installation media via Microsoft’s Media Creation Tool.

Step 2. Change BIOS boot sequence to give the bootable USB drive or DVD/CD disc boot priority.

Step 3. Insert the Windows10 installation media USB drive or DVD/CD disc to your computer and boot from it.

Step 4. Select your language preferences, and click on Next button to continue.

Step 5. Click on Install now.

Step 6. Follow the instruction and let it install automatically. The installation process will start and your PC will reboot. When it’s finished, you just need to log in with your account.

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Solution 9. Replace your Graphics Card with a New One

If all of the above methods don’t work for your computer, the issue “Display drive has stopped responding and has recovered” is possibly caused by a defective graphics card. In this case, you have no choice but to buy a new one.

“By following the steps in this post, I successfully fixed display drive has stopped responding and has recovered Windows 10 issue. I would like to share this step-by-step tutorial with more friends who have display drive stoped responding problem on their computers.”Click to Tweet

Conclusion

After showing you the 9 methods to fix “Display drive has stopped responding and has recovered Nvidia” error, you can try these methods one by one or choose the most suitable one according to your situation.

If you have any question about how to fix display drive stopped responding and has recovered Windows 10 issue with the 9 solutions or if you have other better solutions, you can leave a message in the following comment zone and we will reply as soon as possible. If you need any help when using MiniTool software, you may contact us via [email protected].

Display Driver Stopped Responding and Has Recovered FAQ