6600GT and Battlefield 2 problems

Hey all,

I installed my nice shiny (at least the HSF is very shiny) XFX 6600GT yesterday.
Very nice. Ran a whole bunch of benchmarks on it, to compare to my last card, and stress test the card (Aquamark, 3dMark03 and 05). They worked perfectly, and showed a marked improvement (between 27 and 88 percent) over my 9600XT. So, the card appears to work fine.

I tried BF2 last night. Initially I set the resolution up to 1280x960 with all settings on medium, just to see what would happen. Game play was a little choppy, but in between the occasional stutter it played remarkably smoothly. I put the stuttering down to the lack of RAM (its 128Mb card, not 256).

I then changed the settings to 1024x768, with everthing on high, and joined a server.
Big problems. The sound and video were stuttering continuously, and I experience very bad graphics corruption - random polygons and all sorts all over the screen.

I've tried a number of things to remedy this:
o Cleaning out the BF2 optimisation cache directory and restarting
o Changing resolution and details back and forth
o Changing screen refresh rate.

All to no avail. The last thing that happened was a BSOD. This is the first time I've seen this in quite a while. I got an error relating to an Nvidia DLL (can't remember exactly which one, I'm not in front of my PC currently).

This suggests maybe a driver issue. I'm currently using the latest nVidia drivers:
o 81.85

Before I set about trying things like reinstalling drivers, I just wanted to find out if there were known problems with nVidia cards, or XFX cards and BF2, if anyone else has experienced similar problems, and if anyone has other suggestions.

Oh, my powersupply is an Enermax 350W unit (which meets the requirements for the card). PC spec as available on the left...

Thanks for any help!

Mut.

Mutley,
I had the same prob running BF2 with 2x6600gt's. I just got rid of my 2x512 corsair DDR400 mem modules for two 1gb g.skill modules. Online game play is smooth as glass now. I think others will tell you BF2, FEAR, Quake 4 all like and benefit from 2gb of mem.

Well, it certainly improved when I went from 512Mb to 1gb.
however, I was running BF2 perfectly fine with a 9600XT. That had 256MB of RAM which helped.

Don't think that would explain the graphical corruption issues though, which seem to go hand-in-hand with the performance problems.

Did you try reg cleaner? To clean off the remaining ATI drivers and registry? Try that and reinstall the card *fresh and see what happens..

Stuttering.. that is definitely a memory problem.. the 128MB frame buffer might the cause as well..

Those graphical anomalies are normally associated with driver corruption or incorrect memory allocation by conflicting drivers or incorrect overclocking.. This happened to me just by using Leadtek's 77.77 versus Nvidia's 77.77... rubbish artifacts and rendering problems until i cleaned up everything and install using nvidia's 77.77..

EDIT: Using reg cleaner.. you will have to uninstall all your older drivers 1st, that goes for both Nvidia's and ATI's... restart and run reg cleaner to pick up the remaining trash.. Then install your shiny new card again..

Is your 6600gt a 128mb version? In any case, increased graphics performance also relates directly to increased CPU/Mem usage. I currently run at 1280x1024, all medium settings and AAx2. Usually, at this setting I am getting 60-70 frames a sec. I know buying more memory is a tough decision, but it is one I weighed on for a while. Now, i have no complaints. As for corruption, that sounds like an O/C'ed card. If it is, I suggest backing the clocks off ti lits gone.

Nope, no OC. Card is completely stock. I've not changed anything.
I'm banking on it being a driver corruption issue. I thought I had really cleaned out the ATI drivers. I don't see that being a problem, but I'll uninstall the nV drivers, and try cleaning up again.

I was expecting a little bit of stuttering at higher res due to have 128Mb, but this is not that kind of stuttering. Its continous.

Maybe I should down-rev the drivers? I read somewhere that there are BF2-version nVidia drivers supplied with the game. Maybe I should check the DVD.

Mutley,
Since you are using 81.85, you should be able to go to your control panel, then application profiles and select BF2 under driver profile. It's default is Global settings or something like that. Try using this profile. Sawyen is right, as you should also try to install *fresh. Make sure you turn off any kind of antivirus before updating the drivers. BTW, No need to downclock card if it runs at stock speeds.

Got it working! Thanks for all the feedback.

Before I installed the new card, I was pretty thorough in removing all traces of the previous ATI drivers, and the nVidia driver installation was the only one performed.

The only thing I can put it down to is the AGP aperture size, of which a lot of rubbish is talked. For some reason I had it set to 64Mb. I increased this to 256Mb, and things improved...

I still get stuttering, but the kind I'd expect with the frame buffer on this card, and 128Mb. The stuttering I had previously was basically the game leaping between running at 2fps and 6fps. Not playable. Now, once I've been playing for a couple of minutes everything is more or less fine.

I also tried returned my FSB to stock speeds, but that wasn't it. Thats now pushed back up to 125Mhz, giving me a 1/2Ghz boost on my P4. Which is nice.

One other thing I did was to remove all the cached texture optimisation for BF2, set the video options again, join a game, exit, and defrag. Everybit helps.

Thanks again all.
Mut.