NVIDIA control panel crashes games

[GatelyW]

LiveKernelError 141: Crashing when using balanced settings in Nvidia Control Center.

 

I have a RTX 3070 Ti, an i7-13700KF, 64BG RAM, and an 850W power supply.

 

Recently, I got a new FreeSync monitor and was trying to get it working with G-Sync. Unfortunately, I had a bit of trouble doing this (There was a lot of flickering) so I just gave up and decided to leave G-Sync off. In doing this I messed with some settings in my Nvidia Control Panel that I didn't know would cause instability.

 

Flash forward 2 days where I want to play Overwatch with my friends. I notice much higher frame rates than what I'm used to; about \~30-40 more frames per second. After only a few minutes of gameplay, Overwatch crashes without any error message (from the Overwatch application). I reopen it, and it crashes again. I check my reliability history, and it shows that both crashes were to result of hardware failure, or more specifically LiveKernelError 141.

 

After attempting to play other games and getting the same crash error with all of them, I decide to investigate. Running a benchmark, I notice that my GPU is suddenly performing waaaay better than it ever had before... like a 130% performance increase! This- for me- isn't good because as I know from my previous overclocking attempts my GPU doesn't overclock very far (maybe due to poor silicon quality?), and I was only ever able to scrape a few extra frames in before it started to crash.

 

Even after removing the overclock that I had on my GPU it still overperformed. It actively reached clock speeds of over 10,000 during gaming (which is much higher than the GPU should be capable of according to google), and sometimes would draw about 310 Watts (Which I'm not sure how this is possible since the 2 cables it is connected to from power supply apparently only supply 150 Watts each. Also, despite this load, the GPU never reached temperatures about 75C even on full load. The temperature being low is expected for me, though, because I have this stupidly over engineered Gigabyte version of the 3070 Ti which has overkill cooling.

 

Long story short, after various BIOS resets and other settings changes, I eventually found the culprit: Nvidia Control Panel. When I was messing around with the Nvidia Control Panel while trying to set up and fix G-Sync, I changed some settings under "Image Settings with Preview". I changed it to use a profile emphasizing performance, when I previously had it set to emphasize quality. At the time it seemed like a good idea because "oooh performance that sounds cool", but apparently this causes the GPU to overperform like crazy. Switching it back to the quality profile brings the GPU back to its "slightly underperforming but stable" state that it was at before this whole conundrum. My GPU is brand new by the way.

 

TL; DR: Switching "Use profile emphasizing" in Nvidia Control Panel from Performance to Quality fixed instability.

 

Anyways with my story out of the way here are my questions:

 

1. Why did switching that setting in the Nvidia Control Panel affect my GPU so much?

2. Are there any potential fixes so that I can use my GPU using the Performance profile?

3. What exactly is LiveKernelError 141?

[Mark Kaine]

then don't use "balanced" settings,  try the default ones?

 

 

you aren't really supposed to change settings when you don't know what they do.

 

if this is more a enquiry as for *why* this doesn't work then idk that tbh (what's balanced settings anyway just use default or high quality tbh)

11 minutes ago, GatelyW said:

Why did switching that setting in the Nvidia Control Panel affect my GPU so much?

its very unclear what you even changed,  screenshot? 

[GatelyW]

Balanced IS the default. In the Nvidia control panel, you have the option to either set global 3D application settings manually, or select from one of 3 default profiles: Emphasize Performance, Balanced, Emphasize Quality. In order for my GPU to be stable, I must have the Emphasize Quality preset selected (This is unusual behavior; all 3 profiles should be stable). These settings are easily modifiable, and they exist FOR people who aren't familiar with which 3D application settings are best for what they want. I am very familiar with the settings inside the control panel, and I know what most of them are. Most of them are just Anti-Aliasing variations and performance limiters- so I can't figure out why it curves the GPU's performance so heavily.

 

Edit: I'll send a screenshot of it when I get home. I am currently trying this from my laptop, which uses an AMD chipset.