Had a case recently where my gaming performance was absolutely shockingly terrible, to the point where the game I was playing was like a slideshow.

Now I’m running a GT555M in this machine so it’s not the fastest thing in the world but most games are usually playable on it.

I decided to look into the possibility of overclocking my video card slightly to see if that helped and this is when I came across an interesting fact about the Nvidia drivers.

If the driver crashes for whatever reason they go into a failsafe mode which runs the GPU at a very low clock speed (Just over 200Mhz in the case of my GT555M instead of the 590Mhz it Should have been running at) it seems the only way to fix it is to do one of 2 things.

 

1) Reboot the machine

Or

2) If you’re running a machine with optimus you might be able to get away with disabling/re-enabling the nvidia card in the device manager

Optimus machines use a combination of the Nvidia and Intel cards, I’m not really sure what would happen on a machine with just one video card, I think it reverts to the standard VGA driver but I’d suggest one doesn’t try it just in case they end up with no video output.