Media Center problems and ATI 10.10 and above

I have recently noticed that while watching live TV in Windows Media Center I would get random ATI driver stopped responding and was recovered message. The Live TV works, suddenly the screen freezes, blacks out, recovers and continues playing.

I have Acer 8942g with ATI 5850 1GB GDDR3 card.

I have tried to reinstall driver:
Catalyst 10.10, a,b,c,d,e hotfix versions and 10.11 all have this problem!
Catalyst 10.9, 10.8, 10.7 and 10.6 don't! They work ok.

Now I tried default driver settings, Powerplay settings, even modded drivers like Van's and the only way I can get it working as before is to go to let's say Catalyst 10.9. If I leave windows to install the default driver - everything works perfectly (it is an older driver), but no CCC for advanced settings. And yes - my games work flawlessly with all these drivers - even with the newest 10.10e hotfix and a bit older but the newest WHQL 10.11.

I hope they fix it because newer drivers have nice hardware accelerations and stuff...

 

Just a little update,check this out: Timeout Detection and Recovery of GPUs through WDDM

The article actually covers Vista, but I tried it anyways.

Instead of completely disabling TDR I decided to try something else.

I added this: TdrDelay: REG_DWORD and changed the value to 5 secs (instead the default 2).

Now I don't have these issues anymore. I use Ati 10.11 WHQL drivers.

Now this is for debugging purposes only, so please if someone is more into this to try to explain why delaying of TDR actually fixes this? And I assume in case of actual graphic card freeze it will kick in and reset it?

My theory is this: Graphics card for various reasons don't "report" to the OS in a timely manner - I read it could be all kinds of things: low voltage, very low frame rate, overheating etc..., and TDR is a system that triggers graphics card recovery by "resetting it". Now while watching live TV over an USB dvb-t card I guess this happens more often with some drivers. Giving Windows more time to wait for GPU to respond we avoid the recovering.

And for people who want to try it - easy steps are here: Windows Vista & 7 : How to disable the Timeout Detection and Recovery of GPUs through WDDM - .: GPGPU :. (Cuda, OpenCL, DirectCompute)

Cheers and I hope it fixes this for you too....

 

Update: It didn't solve it completely, but now at least I get it once or twice per day (instead per hour). It is still the driver... I tried some old drivers and all work correctly. Only 10.10 and 10.11 have this issue.