What is Timeout Detection and Recovery and why should I care?
A commonly observed issue in older Windows versions is when the system freezes while performing Graphics-related operations (while playing games, for instance). Since at this point, the GPU is busy processing a complex graphical computation, it does not update anything on the display, usually causing the user to reboot the system. To avoid this problem, Windows Vista and later editions incorporate a mechanism for recovery from any such unresponsiveness of the graphics driver, called as Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR). Essentially, this system resets the state of the GPU when it detects a complicated computation on the GPU that’s taking longer than a pre-specified period of time (The preset time interval in seconds is set using a registry key, ‘TdrDelay’).
