8800GTX Rant

[Thorburn]

A week or two ago I spent roughly £400 on an 8800GTX and I am very much left feeling like a second rate customer by NVIDIA.
Since the cards release there have been two XP x86 driver versions, both suffering nasty incompatibilities (and not just in niche games, more like things like Counter Strike Source), one XP x64 driver (same problems).

Now that I've moved my system to dual booting Vista x64 (god bless Microsoft for there issueing of RTM keys to Beta testers) and XP x86 I've put my 7800GTX back in because when it comes to Vista and my card with a big NVIDIA Vista Essential logo on the box there is exactly squat in the way of drivers for it.

I know this is the price you pay for being an early adopter, but I've had previous cards (I had one of the first batch of GF1's shipped to the UK, a Ti4600 pre-release, and a 6800 Ultra the same week it launched) and I've never had problems like I'm having with this. Even the move from Windows 98 to 2000 was handled smoothly with drivers for all the cards available in good time.

Whats more back then NVIDIA beta drivers came around on a near daily basis, and official drivers were at least of decent quality so for the early adopter there was always plenty to mess around with and try out if you were having problems, but suddenly its all gone very quiet.

Look around on NVIDIA centric forums and theres plenty people finding the same and no real answers coming from them.
NVIDIA have done a great job on the hardware, now can we please have some working software for it?

[nope]

Dude I did this yesterday and they took my hard work thread , it has had about 1000 hits in total with the five places I had posted that , yes I agree with you dude for the lack of support and the arragantness of Nvidia.

PS dude you owe us some pics , its a very small review if it is one. I have some pics of my XFX8800gtx , how come I have net done a review on it

[tpfoster]

If it had been me i would have held off for a while because it would have been someone else having problems. I wouldn't imagine that anything you are using currently requires that kind of graphics card. Plus, if you had waited a while, even just a few months till when vista comes out you would have saved quite a bit of money However you probably wouldn't get one so easily then because everyone will be buying them in preparation for vista. You can't win either way

[Thorburn]

I wouldn't imagine that anything you are using currently requires that kind of graphics card.

I'd disagree with that.
Previously I had a 7950GX2 and I use a Dell 2407WFP so naturally I want to run games at 1920x1200.
SLI is far from perfect and in a lot of games (including my personal favourite, GTR2) even with anti-aliasing disabled things got a bit choppy at this resolution.
With the 8800GTX its silky smooth even with 8x AA and even 16x AA is playable, better than the 7950GX2 with none at all.

Its an incredible card and I don't regret buying it, I just wish I could use it in Vista

[11modders]

I'd love to know why your using a 64bit x86 OS when 64bit seems to be pretty dead at the moment

[Thorburn]

Well for the purpose of this rant the drivers aren't available for 32-bit either so it makes little difference.
But otherwise, well why wouldn't I?
64-bit processors are no longer a niche market, they offer benefits even for 32-bit programs (for example the ability for a 32-bit program to address 4GB per program running in WoW64 mode, or even simply the ability to address 4GB of memory, something I hope to upgrade to soon), and I'm hoping with Vista 64-bit will become more mainstream and drive improved compatibility and performance.

[Zak33]

interesting thread.

nVidia....driver kings of the world (they've always been the kiddies for driver support) might have lost a little focus?

I don't know....maybe?

[Thorburn]

To be fair, I almost prefer no driver support to Catalyst....

[Griffo_]

Always a possibility that they've gone a little lax in their drivers but.. controversial indeed.

[chuckskull]

Wow thread revival, but I'm running and a 8800GTS on vista x64 and it works brilliantly.

Driver problems are probably par for the course, months before the OS release

[Thorburn]

Yep even I can't complain (too much) these days.

They work fairly well for me now, some annoying bugs (no overclocking for example) and missing features, but for the most part not too bad.

[moogle]

I'd love to know why your using a 64bit x86 OS when 64bit seems to be pretty dead at the moment

not if your someone who needs to use 4gb or more of memory.

[chuckskull]

They work fairly well for me now, some annoying bugs (no overclocking for example) and missing features, but for the most part not too bad.

Yeah the no overcloking is annoying. nTune is supposed to be bale to do it, but it just hangs for me. Then again I think they can hold out a little longer without being OC'd.