Hi all,
I´ve been dealing with a technical issue on my laptop for the past few weeks, and wanted to approach the tech-savvy folks here on the forum for help before potentially trying in other corners of the internet.. It´s gonna be a long description, so sorry about that.
So, over two weeks ago, I was playing a game via PCSX2 and suddenly had the whole thing freeze (alongside audio, with the accompanying brrrrr sound) and resulting in a BSOD. It came out of nowhere, as I had never had this issue before when using it, so I was caught off guard and didn´t even notice what the displayed error was. After the laptop rebooted and I ran the emulator again, I found out my NVIDIA GPU is not being used and the NVIDIA Control Panel is gone.
I checked Device Manager, and the GPU was shown there, but had an exclamation mark to it, and while it showed that drivers are installed, the last tab (the exact English name of which I don´t know … should be „Means“ or something along those lines) said that it can´t display anything (or that the GPU isn´t using anything? I´d have to check next time this happens) because there is a problem with the device. I then ran the NVIDIA App, which said that no drivers are installed.
Now, I should probably point out that I was not using the latest NVIDIA drivers at that point. The last update I did was last year in November. Anyways, I simply express-installed the new driver via the App and things worked as they should, including the emulator, but then it froze again. No BSOD, just a complete PC freeze. At that point the only common thing about both incidents was that I was running the emulator and Chrome. During the first BSOD, the emulator was running a game while Chrome was open but minimised. On the second occasion, I had the emulator paused and was looking up something in Chrome, when the website and everything else froze. Anyways, restarted the laptop and had the same result. NVIDIA drivers missing, GPU showing in Device Manager with exclamation mark.
I did a driver (re)installation via NVIDIA App, this time a clean one, and due to the above, I was under the impression that maybe there´s some sort of driver conflict between the emulator and Chrome, so I avoided running them at the same time. Actually, I believe I haven´t ran PCSX2 since then at all.
I played a short session of AC: Liberation a day or two later, and it went fine. I exited the game and wanted to play a different one afterwards, but when I turned it on, it was running on my Intel GPU. Exited the game and found out that drivers and Control Panel are once again showed as missing. Indeed, the issue happened without any crash or freeze whatsoever between playing two different games. I tried just rebooting the laptop, and that was enough for both of them to reappear.
Things were then fine for about a week, during which I was playing some regular games via Steam and GOG, mainly The Witcher 3 and a little bit of WoA (which crashed to desktop on me twice, but I assume that was related to the recent patch). Had no issues whatsoever, no BSOD crashing, freezing, or drivers disappearing.
Until I played The Witcher 2 later last week, and had the game freeze during a conversation (it had been working fine for several hours before that). Audio was working, but the game froze, forcing me to do a hard reboot. Again, drivers shown as missing, no Control Panel, and GPU shown in Device Manager with exclamation mark. Tried rebooting and shutting off/restarting to see if they would reappear again, but had no such luck. So this time I thought maybe the issue is with some remnants of the old NVIDIA driver causing issues, so I decided to do one more driver installation via NVIDIA App, and if the issue happened again, I´d try reinstalling the drivers using DDU.
Lo and behold, on Sunday afternoon I booted up my laptop (saw the desktop show up), didn´t even touch anything, went to the bathroom, and when I came back, I found it in a state of rebooting, after which the drivers were once again gone. So yeah, this time no freeze, no crash, no BSOD, just a completely random self-initiated reboot (or maybe there was a crash/BSOD that happened while I was away, but either way I didn´t do anything, not even move the mouse around). Restarting didn´t make them reappear.
So I went and used DDU (my first time ever doing so) to uninstall the NVIDIA drivers in Safe Mode, did the manual installation afterwards, the whole proper process… Things were fine for the rest of Sunday and pretty much all of yesterday. I actually played a lot of The Witcher 2 yesterday cause I had the free time, and there were no issues whatsoever. Then I wanted to play a few minutes late at night before going to bed (the laptop had not been turned off in the meantime), and the game froze on me 5 minutes in. Complete freeze, no response, and eventually a BSOD. This time I checked for the error, which was „DPC Watchdog Violation“. Again, the drivers and Control Panel disappeared, but simply rebooting the PC normally made them appear properly again (so today they areso far showing up and working).
As you can see, the basic issue is NVIDIA drivers „disappearing“, and it has mainly happened after certain games freezing or crashing, but also happened once in Chrome (with a paused PCSX2 in the backgound) and at least twice outside of games or any activity whatsoever. It has happened several times over the past few weeks, but with roughly a week of no issues. On a few occasions, rebooting the PC was enough to have the drivers “reappear”, but otherwise they don´t. I´ve been thinking of trying DDU one more time, this time choosing the option for installing new GPUs (before I just did the standard clean remove and reboot), but I don´t think it´ll help.
I am at wit´s end with regards to what is causing the issue and what to do about it. Is it a driver thing? A software thing? A hardware thing? Is it strictly related to my GPU, or is another piece of SW/HW causing it? I searched some info online on the DPC Watchdog Violation error, and apparently driver and/or software issues seem to be the most common culprits (sometimes even USB ports), but I still have no clue what to do to pinpoint what´s causing it for me. If anyone could help me troubleshoot this and determine what the cause is, that would be great.
I´m on Windows 10. I can list the HW details if necessary, and I have the crashdump from yesterday´s BSOD if needed, but have no experience or knowledge on how to open and decipher the dmp.
Thanks.
Edit:
- I haven´t checked if any other device displays an exclamation mark after the issue, as I´ve only ever checked the GPU, but will check when/if this happens again.
- Would installing an older NVIDIA driver be an option? I was considering it, but seeing that the initial crash happened on an older driver in the first place, I´m not sure if that would resolve the issue.
