Resetting of the Display Driver in Windows
Troubleshooting Display Driver Resets
Some releases of Windows may report "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" after resetting the display driver (a two second blackout) when running a longer computation on a CUDA device. This should only occur on machines where the CUDA card is being used as both a compute device and as the display driver (which is not suggested). In order to reduce display lock-ups resulting from the GPU not responding, Microsoft added a Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR) mechanism that resets the card after the GPU scheduler detects that is has been busy for longer than two seconds (default timeout setting).
This can be rectified in two ways:
1. Don't use the CUDA card as both a compute device and the display driver. Use two devices and dedicate each to one of the tasks.
2. Note, this method will cause display updates to be delayed, possibly for a long time. However, if you want the card to be unhindered while performing longer computations and understand that while it is busy display updates will not occur, then this method is acceptable. An update to the registry setting is required:
From regedit navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE>SYSTEM>CurrentControlSet>Control>GraphicsDrivers
Add "TdrDelay" as a REG_DWORD entry with a value representing the number of seconds you will allow a computation to proceed until the GPU scheduler sends a reset to the device (believing that it has timed out and requires resetting).
Restart your machine for the settings to take effect.
See Also
CUDA
Routines Accelerated by the CUDA Package
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