I managed to fix (until now) the issue.
I realized there's a difference on how pCars, Assetto Corsa and other games "talk" to Nvidia driver in contrast to rFactor 2. Please have a look at the table below:
It seems rFactor 2 are "asking" for less GPU power demand even under heavy GPU usage. Whereas pCars delta between GPU usage and GPU power demand is 0.85% in average, rFactor 2 presents -10.62% of difference in average of power x usage. It's quite away.
The correlation matrix in both cases are useless since pCars raw data is very homogeneous, but we can spot moments while pCars are requiring 90% of GPU usage and GPU power is almost steady, always around 90% as well. In constrast, rFactor has recors with 90% of GPU usage and less than 75% of GPU power demanding!
This is a typical sample, all the time I have a crash the tables present this behavior. So I concluded that, for some reason, rF2 graphical engine is not requiring proper GPU power from PSU, the graphics board works cooler than could and when the game changes to a external camera (example) with close cars (detailed LODs), there's no power to supply the sudden demand and = gpu crash. It's something like GPU is "lazy" to wake up and wavers to demand more power which leads to a hardware reboot (black screen), although sound engine and CPU processing keep alive.
So, what I did? Downloaded EVGA Precision X16 (
http://www.evga.com/precision/) which should be able to manage any board brand, not only EVGA, and set it up as following:
- Increased power target to 111% and set it to priority.
- Increased temperature target to 80º, which should be OK according to card manufacturer.
- Forced fans to work faster with a personal map (maybe not necessary)
- Increased GPU voltage in 6 mV (minimum step).
This increased the GPU power demand from my PSU and there is no more crashes in rF2 so far. When the game asks 99 - 100% of GPU usage, there is enough power to keep the software running now. Please notice it's not an overclocking procedure at all. It only will drain more eletrical power from unit to your board.
When I reverted to default EVGA settings, I had crashes again. Increased Power target, no crashes. So I believe it may work for other guys than me.
I cannot guarantee it will work for you but I think is a worth try. It's good to mention I have a good Corsair 1200W unit as well, so if you using a cheap PSU perhaps you'll encounter some trouble.
Add: both pCars and rF2 @ 1080px no Vsync.
I believe that errors are triggered by a Windows service called 'Timeout Detection and Recovery' (TDR)and would like to know why this is more common in rFactor2 then other games and find good fix to it which can help OT and community.
