game crashing

I have a problem where the game will crash, either just a CTD or a BSOD, if I play for too long. I learnt that if it CTD then starting the game would cause a BSOD, now today I found that just trying to upgrade graphics driver after it CTD caused it to BSOD. When it CTD I get a message about a fault with nvd3dum.dll. I've been trying to fix it by changing settings and updating drivers and things like that but after having no success figuring it out I thought what chages have there been since it worked regularly normally. I am starting to think ti might have been since the last patch.