Seeing GPU crashes in Windows 7? Stop banging your head and grab this fix

Nvidia has rolled out a 'hotfix' driver for GeForce GPU owners who have been experiencing random application crashes and/or TDR (timeout detection and recovery) errors, but there's a catch—it's only for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users. Apparently these issues came about with the previous GeForce 418.81 driver release.

"A GeForce driver is an incredibly complex piece of software, We have an army of software engineers constantly adding features and fixing bugs. These changes are checked into the main driver branches, which are eventually run through a massive QA process and released," Nvidia's Manuel Guzman stated in the company's support forum.

"Since we have so many changes being checked in, we usually try to align driver releases with significant game or product releases. This process has served us pretty well over the years but it has one significant weakness. Sometimes a change that is important to many users might end up sitting and waiting until we are able to release the driver," Guzmen added.

Guzman's referring to Nvidia's push to release 'Game Ready' drivers, which often come out just ahead of new blockbuster games and contain performance optimizations for them. However, they sometimes introduce bugs. That is where hotfixes like this one come into play.

Some users say they're seeing the same errors in Windows 10, and unfortunately this hotfix won't do anything for them. If you're running Windows 10 and are seeing display driver crashes, you can either roll back your driver to a previous release, or hang tight for the next update and hope it gets resolved.