Interactive · GPU Telemetry

Power States: Idle, Wake & the Crash Window

A modern GPU constantly throttles itself up and down through P-states to save power. Push the buttons to move the card between full load and deep idle, and watch what happens on the way back up — especially with an app holding memory on the card.

P-State LadderPower ↓

Core Clock

2700MHz

Mem Clock

21000MHz

Power Draw

285W

Core Temp

64°C

Card under load at P0 — full clocks, full power. This is the GPU doing actual work.

App pinning VRAMoff

What you're looking at. At idle (P8) the card parks its clocks and sips ~15 W — it's basically napping. The dangerous moment isn't idle itself; it's the wake transition, when the driver hands the card back to full power. Flip “App pinning VRAM” on (that's apps like DaVinci Resolve holding cached memory on the card) and hit Wake: the handoff happens while a stale memory reference is still live, and that's the race that crashes nvlddmkm.sys. With nothing pinning VRAM, the same wake is clean. Telemetry values are illustrative for a 40-series card.

Plain-English glossary

P-state: The GPU's gears. It shifts up and down between them to save power — P0 is full throttle, P8 is nearly asleep.
VRAM: The graphics card's own private memory, separate from your computer's main RAM.
Wake / handoff: The moment the driver brings the card back from idle to full power. The timing-sensitive part.
Pinned VRAM: Memory an app refuses to let go of, even while it sits idle in the background (e.g. DaVinci Resolve).
nvlddmkm.sys: NVIDIA's kernel driver — the part of Windows that talks directly to your graphics card.
BSOD: Blue Screen of Death. Windows hitting an error it can't recover from, so it stops and reboots.