Nvidia Forceware 161 - 163.69 are a pile of ****

Alright, if there's any Nvidia fanboy's around.. please.. just let me finish this before I see flames going about..

I can officially, bonafied proven, and swivel down 6 feet under say that Nvidia's latest 2 driver release for Vista are completely b*ll***!

Now not only that I can't play Guild Wars Nightfall for more than 10 minutes, I get checkered random effects on walls during CS Source, Company of Heroes gets wonderful hiccups and most notoriously sudden crashes..

Only by reverting to the 159 series can even get these games playing correctly..

The Nvidia drivers team needs to improve... ALOT..

I moved to Nvidia under the impression that the drivers were better and that the 8800 were really quick.. now I can't even get games my old X1800XT wiped-floors running correctly..

Don't even mention about MOH:Airborne or WIC, both games are performing like poo now with these older drivers.. They're actually not that old tbh.. gosh, do I have to update my drivers everytime just to get one game playing at 'acceptable framerates' but lose compatability on all other games?

Wish they'd learn from the Redeon Catalyst team..

I cant complain with the 163.69 drivers.
They brought the color profiles to full screened apps/games which was horrible to play without.

I'm back using the 159 drivers as well Sawyen. All the recent releases have fix one thing and broken another. The 159 series seem to give me the best in all games, but as you say they're not really the best drivers to be playing Bioshock and Airborne with.

Yeah. They have the best hardware, but the driver problems are chronic.

well Airborne is giving me poo framerates whenever motion blur is sort of running on 159 drivers (which is basically the whole game.. unless i walk slowly and not run.. then I get respectable framerates).. pop in 163.69 and the game works miracles, but all my older titles are left for dead.. or is giving wierd looking rendering..

+ I am unable to play GW on these drivers. I'm currently on 159.22.. Nvidia can kiss my **** until they fix up something thats half decent and not BETA drivers without a BETA branded to it..

Also, my overclock will only work with 159.22 for some reason.. going any higher my OC seems to deteriorate..

159.22 - 600/1900 (everything stable.. 3dmark can loop forever for all I care)
161.xx - anything higher than 570MHz seems to freeze the system.. forget about 3DMark.. I cant even get pass the Nv control panel..
163.69 - now my memory overclock goes poo.. I cant even slide anything higher than stock, or my system freezes..

nHancer wont work with the 193.69 32 bit drivers. :(

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by No.72

nHancer wont work with the 193.69 32 bit drivers. :(

---

Not really surprising, is it? :P

It's strange such a u-turn has come about. ATi's reputation is one of decent hardware but poor drivers, while nV's always had a great driver reputation. Still, I can't say I've much to complain about the nV drivers performance, as I don't use any of their current gaming cards, but the lack of features in some of their earlier Vista drivers were just horrific. I refuse to test these ones due to the horror stories that's been posted from many.

My biggest complaint with nV drivers are their lack of support for their latest mobile chips, as I'm having to use 101.xx with our new Dell Vostros at work. You can hack the latest drivers to work with the 8x00Ms, but you lose even more functionality through doing it (mainly the rather critical power-saving tweaks). I wouldn't care, but the 101s don't even have temperature monitoring...

To be fair, some of the earlier ATi 9000 series mobile support wasn't any better, forcing you into using 1 version of the drivers, available only from the vendor, but that's not been the case for years now.

Why's it like this? It can't be marketing... most of the code can be transferred from the desktop drivers... it's just laziness.

I dont know what everyone is complaining at, the 8800 series has only been out around 10 months :lol:

This is a pet hate of mine, and I think nvidia should be ashamed of themselves and their piss poor drivers.

True, although not directly to do with nvidia drivers it would be brilliant if AA actually worked in the unreal engine with Bioshock and moh-a as the jaggies completely ruin it.:)

So hands up whos going to get the 9 series cards when they come out with there perfect drivers. lol

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by daza

So hands up whos going to get the 9 series cards when they come out with there perfect drivers. lol

---

you wish. :mrgreen:

Have you tried the beta drivers?
Can't say i've noticed much but the only game i have that your having probs with is Company of heroes.

Make sure you file a report with nvidia or you will only be complaining about the same thing when the next ones come out.

163.71 are out, not sure if they'll help your problems, another thing to watch out for is nvidia can be horribly slow in publishing the new drivers on their site, keep an eye on http://forums.guru3d.com/forumdisplay.php?f=21 for the most recent betas.

I seem to have avoided most of the 8800 probs since the original Vista issues, but be sure to make a report about their pretty good in responding/fixing, especially for vista.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by daza

So hands up whos going to get the 9 series cards when they come out with there perfect drivers. lol

---

If the 8900/9900 series cards come out before proper working drivers for the 8800 series cards, I will be going for a full refund on my GTX as it is not fit for purpose.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Clunk

I dont know what everyone is complaining at, the 8800 series has only been out around 10 months :lol:

This is a pet hate of mine, and I think nvidia should be ashamed of themselves and their piss poor drivers.

---

Really? You mean the ones the press say are the best in the industry?

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...date/page9.asp

Quote:

---

NVIDIA in particular has made tremendous strides with their latest Vista driver, SLI support is fully functional for all GeForce card owners and it scales well in most cases. Unfortunately, CrossFire compatibility is still an issue for AMD.

---

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Ha...ossfire/9.html

Quote:

---

As of the time of writing of this article (mid-September, 2007), all indication seem to point towards SLI having better driver support than CrossFire. After looking through all the benchmarks, it would be hard to claim otherwise. The only game that benefited from CrossFire support was Lost Planet -- and even then, there was image corruption.

---

Go figure- the drivers the OP says are a "pile of ****"" the independent industry press says are great , and the best available.

Who to believe? :rolleyes:

What do you think they should "learn" from the Catalyst team Sawyen? How not to make games work with AA like Bioshock? How to not have multicard support at all like Bioshock, COJ, and World In Conflict? How to have render errors like Lost Planet? Or maybe how to waste a theoretical shader advantage and memory bandwidth advantage and have to fight for 3rd place with your flagship part that showed up 7 mos too late?

Here's the best part- check out how 2900XT performance has actually dropped over the last five driver revisions:
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/h...i_catalyst_79/

They work fine for me. On the flip side... AMD's drivers don't work at all on my AGP 1950Pro. *shrug*