My rant about the current Nvidia drivers for 8800..

Setting up a rant thread to see if anyone is having just as much bad luck as me with the current 8800 drivers..

Now, I got this great card off Exceedgoku not too long ago.. and darn its a great card...
... Well.. at least when it works..

Now I have a fairly old system, for specs see <----------------

The current WHQL drivers for XP is marginally good at best..

1. CoH doesnt work.. I dont know how review sites are actually running this game, all I can do successfully was really using the built-in bench which actually works out to be a very fast card.. now when I decide I'd give Skirmish a go.. 10-15 minutes into the game.. jump straight out and informed me that nv4disp.dll has failed.. and renders my system completely useless now, as its in its 256 colour glory..

2. DiRT works now, thank goodness.. but on every race.. and I mean EVERY race, somewhere there's going to be like a 2 sec pause (and I can be pretty certain its only ONCE.. not twice, not more.. just ONCE).. then resumes as normal.. but during that 2 sec, u have 0 control, and the consequence?.... in the ditch.. and there goes that perfect lap..

3. CS: S works.. Wohoo.. but then load up Italy with 16x CSAA.. the darn game crashes... it sort of gives you a warning with colourful large artifacts here and there.. then disappears.. then the game would just halt.. This same problem occurs on the new Office2007 map, aztec and assault.. Drop AA down to the usual 4xAA, its all fine.. its even fine when you run it on 8xAA standard sampling. Just doesnt bloody work with 16x CSAA..

4. CnC3, thats is more rare.. sudden lost of mouse cursor.. then rendering issues.. then dissapears.. back to normal.. then jumps out nv4disp.dll has failed..

I have more issues, but I'll share it another time..

Just in case anyone is wondering, the card has normal temps.. idles 55ish and loads mid 70s now..

Anyone having these similar issues with the current drivers do tell..

EDIT: and I do have my chipset drivers up till as high as it can go on WHQL..

using there new beta drivers at the mo, i also use rivatuner to up the fan speed to 80&#37; to stop any overheat risks, may be worth you trying them

are they any good?

yeh.. on my system, not got any of the games u list tho bud, but give em a try, 162.18 i think, just hit beta on the nvidia driver page

i used 168'2 with no problems what so ever!

Looks like i have the same card as you!
I'm running on vista 64bit and only prob i get is some games are glitchy when they initially start then settle down.
Only game crashed on me so far was GRAW which came with the card, but no problems with that since i patched it.
Have only had that error you get once before and it was when i was using a 7600 and pushing the graghics settings on company of heroes.
It may be that some other part of your pc is bottlenecked and can't quite support what the 8800 can deliver.
One thing to try is the beta drivers if you havn't already.
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_do...etadriver.html

Sounds like it could be a card problem to be honest.

I've got the BFG OC2 GTS and was running fine on the WHQL drivers (158.something), recently testing the beta 162.something drivers and i do seem to lose some performance, lower FPS on WoW lost 500 points on 3dmark 06.

Unless there are some huge issues with the drivers and games (and CS:S is the only out of those I play myself and I certainly don't see any problems) it would smack of something dodgy hardware wise maybe.

NOOWWW I found the problem.. FINALLY! REJOICE!

Its this silly desktop expose software I've been using.. uninstalled that.. then now everything works.. well at least most..

Now I'm only left with CoH that just doesnt work, and I still get that pause in DiRT..

I initially thought i was a hardware problem.. but had it tested on another computer in uni but it was fine..

Now its all nice and happy.. AHHH.. relief!

Lesson today = TopDesk Expose + 8800 = 4 weeks of headache..

Thanks for everyone's input by the way..

The previuos beta driver had in it's list of things fixed 'better compatability with DX10 COH'
And there has been another beta driver since then released just recently, give that a try.
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_do...etadriver.html

I'm not having any issue with CoH on the latest WHQL driver, not tried yet on the latest 162.xx driver, will give it a go later and post feedback.

Its the rest of the system (CPU mainly) bottlenecking the card.

The company of heroes issue is only for those who have dowloaded the patch 1.7 as this is the dx10 version.
The current offical driver has many problems normally involving extreamly long loading times.
This is supposedly what the beta driver before last was supposed to fix, and it did.......just slowed all other games down.
Not tried the last beta driver yet.
Was a thread for this in the 'wargames' forum on here.