TDR Manipulator

When the GPU of your computer starts processing intensive graphical images, the screen image is not updated, and the computer appears to be completely frozen. Included in Windows Vista and later, the Timeout Detection and Recovery system (in short, TDR) tries to reinitialize the graphic driver and restart the GPU automatically, which usually 'wakes up' the PC from its hanging state without having to reboot.

As you can imagine, tampering with the TDR is not recommended, as it can result in important changes that can ultimately affect the computer's GPU or the entire system. Nevertheless, expert users can alter the TDR configuration settings using an application that is suggestively called TDR Manipulator.

The TDR Manipulator should only be used by professionals, as it tampers with the registry and the graphical processing unit. In essence, its role is to provide assistance in TDR testing and debugging operations.

Of course, the same results can be obtained by changing values in the Registry Editor of Windows directly. However, using an application that specifically targets the TDR configuration without having to browse the registry manually is an advantage.

The parameters you can modify have exactly the same name as their registry keys counterparts. Some of the options are excluded to keep things simple. For instance, the TdrLevel can be either enabled or disabled, unlike the registry key status, which also enables you to choose whether to start GPU recovery upon timeout.

There are four other settings you can alter, such as the TdrDelay, the TdrDidiDelay, the TdrLimitTime, and the TdrLimitCount. The first indicates the number of seconds the request is delayed from the GPU scheduler, the second shows the time interval Windows waits for the driver to recover before checking for bugs and displaying a BSOD accompanied by an error. The third shows the amount of time consecutive TDR actions are allowed without resulting in a computer crash, while the latter parameters shows the exact number of TDRs indicated by the TdrLimitTime.

The registry features additional parameters that TDR Manipulator does not yet enclose. Nevertheless, it's easier to deal with such settings in a simple GUI than browsing through the tree structure of the Registry Editor in Windows.

Whatever tests you intend on doing, it is advisable you restore the default values of the aforementioned parameters before proceeding.