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I just thought I would share something I've known for a bit. The other day I was trying to get a game to run properly (Mirrors Edge in triple-wide) and it seemed like no matter what I did, it ran fine but with shitty FPS. I knew I had run it fine prior but some configs got messed up so I just kinda gave up. Since I wanted to play Mirrors Edge and got nothing but problems, I gave up and settled for a different game: Splinter Cell Conviction. Except, when I loaded the game, the FPS was also terrible. This is an instant clue for me since I've been there and done that; my graphics card crashed. One of the cool things in Vista & 7 is that instead of tossing you a BSOD, Windows can attempt to recover a crashed driver. I don't know why specifically but whenever that happens with an nVidia card and newer drivers, the clocks on the card revert to a safe value (maybe for overclocking crashing?) which is something like 300mhz or 200mhz for the core. A simple restart puts your clocks back to normal but I thought I would share this in case anyone had weird issues ever.

*EDIT*
Depending on what you're doing, you may see an error like this:

Although something was freaking out (probably cuz of the beta driver) and mine kept crashing every 5-15 seconds or so just now and it didn't revert the clocks to the 2D settings. If you ever come across this, check GPU-Z in the Sensors tab and see what your clocks are.

my display drivers did that a lot with my 8800GTS 512. It would crash the game I was playing. I wasn't getting lower than usual FPS though.

In my experiences, it never crashed the game, it would just stall out for a few seconds while the OS recovered the driver then FPS would take a dive.

My game would crash and then I would get that message when I was back at the desktop. It only happened when I played taxing games like Crysis though.