Video Display Error

Acer 5920g with 8600m gt 2gb vista.
Many full screen games go black after an unkown period of time.
The game freezes and will not recover, background music can still be heard. The ! tray icon tells me display has had an error and recovered.
Happens with Crysis, Assassins Creed, and Mass Effect.
Regular use, applications, COD4MP and older games are unaffected.

I initially was under the impression that this was due to TMM looking for alternate displays, but it since has been disabled.
This was happening with released drivers, updated to 177.92 and the issue was not resolved.

It is unpredictable, games run smooth until crash. Temp is usually kind of warm but nothing extreme, low/mid 60c at time of crash.

Any ideas?

 

When running those games, leave task manager minimized in the background, and when running the games at full throttle, alt+tab out, and check the RAM usage and CPU usage.

 

Mass effect with how i have it set up, low quality, like 80-99% cpu and around 1.6gb. Roughly the same with COD4 running with decent quality.
Why do you ask? I'm thinking its a display issue of some sort but?

Should be noted the game is unable to recover after alt tabbing
When game is reopened the behavior is exactly the same as when the error occurs.

 

Since you mentioned that you have tried alternate drivers, then a Driver Conflict is ruled out.

CPU usage and RAM usage are high, so it could be something to do with the pagefile, or the game's built-in feature to shut down and avoid hammering the system's resources.

It could be a hardware conflict as well, so try updating to the latest BIOS version.

Plus, check the event viewer for errors.

 

Bios is updated. I needed to to easily install xp. Note this still happened on xp. I dont currently have xp on the drive as i kept getting hd errors, search stoop to see that painful story.
I see no events of interest, although i know not what im looking for.
As it happens with multiple games, Crysis and Mass Effect are almost unplayable, it leads me to believe that its not the game. Ive continued searching but i've found limited info, many similar problems with the nvidia card tho. Crysis crashes both dx9 and 10

 

Still having the problem. With EVE Online the error does not appear, but the screen goes black, connection is lost, and client is closed. Not sure what the deal is.
Also I've noticed that the first time it will go quite some time with no problem, then it gets progresivly worse with each crash.

 

GPU overheat maybe?

 

try increasing the virtual memory,
as some games use this to store images.