Hello,

DX9Ex. I have the problem with driver stability in time of serial renderings, which i try to use for image processing in memory with fragment shaders. For big bitmaps the video driver sometimes becomes unstable ("Display driver stopped responding and has recovered") and, for instance, if the media player runs video in background, it sometimes freezes and distorts. I tried to use next methods of IDirect3DDevice9Ex:

SetGPUThreadPriority(-7);
WaitForVBlank(0);
EvictManagedResources();

with purpose to give some time for GPU between scenes, but it seems to be has not notable effect in this case. I don't want to reinitilialize subsystem for every step to avoid performance loss.

So, my question is next: does some common practice exists to avoid overloading of GPU by running tasks? Many thanks in advance.

If the workload between any two command queue flushes (typically triggered when you call Present) is over 2 seconds, Windows will assume the GPU has crashed and will reboot it... You can either break up your workload into smaller pieces (e.g. Only process 10% of the pixels at a time) or, you can change this 2 second value to something higher. Search for windows "TDR" settings and you should find an article that describes where it lives in the registry. This isn't really a suitable solution for end users though, as it involves registry tweaking... 

Thanks for reply Hodgman. I don't plan to change any registry values. I tried rarification, it doesn't help and only deteriorates this problem.

Occasionally i've found that it becomes stable if i call "D3DXSaveTextureToFile" after every scene (very slowly but works). Its call seems to be somehow fixes the problem inside this API. It may be happens only because of retrieving texture surface to store it on disk inside this function, but it passes all stages successfully with this calls.

So the question how to do it still remains opened. I didn't find any hints for it in Google. I hope the information above provides additional details for your recommendations. TIA.