Revit 2013 Graphics BSOD

We have been seeing repeated crashes recently with Revit. There are three ways we have seen crashes. 1) The screens flash black for a moment, but come back. Windows throws up a notice that the graphics driver has stopped responding but has recovered. Revit throws up an error and closes. 2) Standard BSOD, mentions nvlddmkm.sys. 3) The screen flashes black but stays black. Power must be cycled to reboot the machine. Recently 1 and 3 have been most frequent.

Memory dump files indicate nvlddmkm.sys as a likely cause after BSOD or full freezes. No crashes have occurred in any other program, including AutoCAD MEP 2013. Freezes seem random - no pattern to tasks being performed or items being added/modified have been noticed.

Right now we just have 3 users working on one project. All three machines have been seeing Revit crashes in this manner. All three have Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 graphics cards. All are 64 bit machines, running Autodesk Revit MEP 2013 update release 2 on Windows 7. Machines specs range from dual core with 4GB RAM to a 12 core machine with 12 GB RAM. Revit file is reasonably sized (50MB), and has been audited recently and some content purged. There are Arch and Structural files linked in as needed as well.

We have tried installing the latest drivers from nvidia. We have tried installing the AutoDesk Certified drivers for this card - v276.42 (8.17.12.7642), even though they are a bit old at this point. Several other versions have been tried as well. We have tried the various things Microsoft mentions in KB 2665946. Issue remains in all cases. Hardware acceleration is enabled on all machines. We could try disabling it, but personally I don't see why this would be necessary with AutoDesk certified drivers on hardware that should be able to handle it.

Any other ideas on what we could try, or a likely cause of these issues - Revit bug, our Revit file, graphics driver, etc? Graphics card hardware failure seems unlikely, since it is effecting multiple machines.

:banghead:

One of the reasons for disabling hardware acceleration is this prevents competition between the dedicated FX1800 card and the on-chip graphics hardware thats built into the latest generation of processors. If it works, you can look into updating the BIOS (some older versions didn't account for dedicated cards, hence the problem) or using the BIOS to manually disable the built-in graphics which should allow the dedicated card to be selected by the software without conflict.

The strange part is the same users on the same hardware had used a previous version of Revit without issue about a year ago. And this issue seemed to begin about half way through this particular project. The only thing I can think of that may have changed is if an updated driver came along for the ride from Windows Update in the last couple months.

I'm the user who has seen the majority of the crashes. One day last late last week I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Revit MEP 2013 with SP2, along with trying a different driver version that is a few months old (9.18.13.732). Its been nearly a week, and I have yet to see a crash since making these changes. I had been averaging a crash about once a day the week before this. Lets hope the trend continues...