nvlddmkm Nvidia Error

Anyone know anything about the nvlddmkm error which causes games to crash with Nvidia graphics cards? I'm having some significant crashing issues in Starfield (and before that Assassin's Creed Valhalla). After a few false starts, I believe I've narrowed the issue down to this nvlddmkm thing. Research indicates its a known issue with Nvidia cards, like my RTX 3070.

I've tried the fixes that I've found through my research, including clean installing the graphics drivers, manually deleting shader caches, underclocking the GPU core clock by 50 MHz. So far nothing seems to fix the issue.

If anyone has any experience and with the issue and any other suggestions, I'm all ears.

If not, is it time to switch to a new card, one from the Radeon lineup?

Is it just the game crashing or PC crashing?

I had some nvidia errors (not in either of those particular games) that caused full PC crash, that I knew weren't power/heat related, and a few things I did that seemed to work:

1. Do you just have nvidia drivers installed or do you have the "Geforce Experience" also installed? Recommend total clean install using ddu driver uninstaller and sticking to the drivers.

2. Do you have Razor (Mouse, keyboard, etc) software installed? I found a lot of issues with that. Consider uninstalling that software if you do/can.

3. Make sure all your power connectors for your video card are tightly plugged in. I don't know if its heat, or something else that causes these things to loosen up, but I swear, just making sure those connectors are tight seemed to fix things for me.

It’s just the game crashing, drops me to the desktop. It was the same with Assassin’s Creed. I do have the GeForce Experience installed, as opposed to the standalone drivers. No Razor software though, I’m all Logitech.

I’ll give the physical connections a once over, and remove GeForce Experience if that doesn’t work. Thanks for the suggestions.

So I started getting these crashes with myAsus rtx 3070 ko and I was attributing it to my video card overclock so I was going to mess with it some more tonight. But starfield has been crashing a lot ever since I changed my changed my i9700k back to 5.0ghz from 4.7(5.0 was working fine with everything but diablo 4 after a June blizzard update) Been noticing it's
nvlddmkm like you describe. I read someone say you can change your registry value to increase the timeout time before it throws the error potentially fixing the crashing too. But that means the video card is having issues if it becomes unresponsive to the system right? That's why I was thinking of turning off my afterburner overclock to see if it works. Then turning my processor back down to 4.7

Link about the registry: https://gameplay.tips/guides/starfie...

For me, underclocking the card didn't seem to have any effect. I did finally cap the FPS at 60 in Nvidia control panel, and that cut the crashes out almost completely.

Nvidia also just dropped new drivers last night. I've updated, but haven't had a chance to play yet, so not sure what impact if any the new drivers will have. If you haven't already, you may want to update to the drivers that just came out before you try anything else.

As to the other question, I can't say I understand the tech enough, but my research did seem to indicate that if the card is throwing these types of errors, then there is a hardware issue with it. As long as I can get around it with tweaks I'm going to leave mine be, but if I run into another batch of crashes that I can't manage to knock out, then replacing the card is definitely on the table.