GPU TdrDelay registry change

I use a 3d program called Blender. There are 2 different ways to render in their cycles render engine. One of those ways is within the viewport. This allows you change materials and lighting on the fly and visually see the changes occuring on the fly.

The other way is just a standard render, that uses tiling and progressively builds the render until it is complete.

OK... what is occuring is I am having my GPU crash when doing the viewport rendering only. I can render the identical scene without crashing doing a non-viewport render. It is important to note that these crashes ONLY occur when using Blender. I use many other graphic programs without any issue.

On a Blender forum it was mentioned that the reason it is occuring is too short of a TdrDelay (default is 2 sec) they recommended a registry change to 15 sec. This is probably more of a workaround to whatever code problems are occuring in the render engine.

I just wanted to get a "second opinion" from some windows/ GPU gurus to see if I could possibly cause any big harm by doing this?

I don't know if your registry change will cause an issue but

you could look at the TDR manipulation tool shown here:

https://forums.geforce.com/default/t...ted-09-01-14-/

@pbcopter Thanks for the link... it kind of seems like there are 2 different approaches being taken from the various posts I have read.. Either disabling TDR or somehow increasing the time from the default.

@NoN Thanks for this link, I am convinced my problem is due to what they noted in your link

Timeout Detection and Recovery is a Windows feature that can detect when video adapter hardware or a driver on your PC has taken longer than expected to complete an operation. When this happens, Windows attempts to recover and reset the graphics hardware. If the GPU is unable to recover and reset the graphics hardware in the time permitted (2 seconds), your system may become unresponsive, and display the error “Display driver stopped responding and has recovered.”

In the case of this viewport rendering inside of Blender, it seems like it is not somehow feeding the info fast enough or correctly for the GPU.... then the GPU appears to be locked up or something to the OS..and the TDR kicks in.

Earlier today I manually created a TDR key with a higher setting... so far, no blue screens or anything after making the change. I'll know after a couple of days if it really worked, because it did always seem to be somewhat random when it was occuring.

But I kind of wish I would have saw your link earlier, because I would have been more comfortable letting Windows Fix It try doing automatically first.

The only thing I couldn't seem to find anywhere, is if you use that fix it utility...what do they actually change the setting to?