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"Display Driver Stopped Responding and Has Recovered"

Intermediate Display & Graphics Applies to: Windows 10, Windows 11

The screen goes black for a second or two, then comes right back — this is Windows catching and correcting a problem, not the problem itself.

Before you start: save any open work and note down what you were doing when the problem started — that context helps if you need to search further or ask for help.
  1. Understand what actually just happened before troubleshooting: this is Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR), a built-in Windows feature that resets a graphics driver that stopped responding in time, instead of letting the whole system freeze or crash. The brief black screen is the recovery working correctly — the real question is why the driver stalled in the first place.
  2. Update your graphics driver directly from the manufacturer's site (NVIDIA, AMD, or Intel) rather than relying on Windows Update alone, which can lag behind the manufacturer's own releases.
  3. If it happens specifically during gaming or video-intensive tasks, check your GPU temperature with a monitoring tool — repeated TDR events under load, but not at idle, points toward overheating rather than a driver bug.
  4. If you've overclocked your GPU, revert to stock clock speeds before troubleshooting further — an unstable overclock is a common, specific cause of exactly this pattern.
  5. Check Reliability Monitor (search "reliability") for a timeline of when these events happen, and see if they line up with a specific app, game, or driver update.
  6. If it only happens rarely, once every few weeks, it's usually not worth deep investigation — TDR events happen occasionally on healthy systems too. Frequent, recurring events are what actually warrants working through the steps above.
Still not fixed? Send us the details and we'll help you dig further, or browse related guides in Display & Graphics.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this shorten the life of my graphics card?
An occasional TDR event isn't known to cause hardware damage — it's a recovery mechanism, not a failure state. Frequent events are more a sign of an underlying driver or thermal issue worth fixing than something causing damage on their own.
Will I lose unsaved work when this happens?
It's possible, especially in a game or graphics-intensive app, since the brief interruption can sometimes cause the affected application to close or become unstable. Regular saving is a reasonable precaution if this happens often.

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