nVidia 8800 GT 512 MB, crappy frame rate

lawson · Post by **lawson** » Sat Feb 23, 2008 9:42 pm

Just throwing my hat into the 'nVidia problem' ring.

Specs: Abit KN9-SLI, nVidia GeForce 7950GT 512MB, WinXP Pro 2GB. ForceWare 169.21

Symptoms (which Fraps shows quite nicely): in-game the frame rate is at 60fps and very gradually decreases until the game's nearly unplayable.

Workaround: Hit graphic options, texture resolution size. Just switching between any of the 256/512/1024/2048 values resets the... um, whatever problem's going on... and it's good again. It's much faster than swapping resolutions or Alt-Enter.

Never actually checked with any tools to determine if it's a memory leak or such.

ImmortalZ · Post by **ImmortalZ** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 8:40 pm

Lawson, did you try downgrading drivers to the 9x series?

TheVoid37 · Post by **TheVoid37** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 2:43 am

You can add me to this list as well. Asus 8800GTS 512 tried probably 20 different drivers this week and can't get any to work. Sitting at my best of 12 fps. I can get 30 fps if I stick in my old 8500GTS card, but not a desired solution.

I went through all the steps listed in this thread, and shouldn't have, the driver cleaner program buggered my system up good. Any of the older drivers upon install state they can't find any hardware on my system that uses the driver I'm trying to install. So that sticks me with the newer drivers which don't work.

Guess I'll be playing Warhammer Online instead for a while.

FIZ · Post by **FIZ** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 3:06 am

Funny thing with this. I have a 8800 GTS and got this issue. Uninstalling the drivers and installing 162.18 worked fine for me, got ~78 fps now, so its crystal. yada yada yada

But the funny thing that happened was my Orange Box. Generation I Source games ran fine (HL:2, HL2: Ep. 1), but the gen II games (Portal, TF2, EP: 2
) would freak out in the main menu. I searched the hell outta the internet for 3 days and couldn't find a reasonable solution (Steam's forums = @#(!). With the rollback the menu works fine now. The games were practically unplayable before, I could still connect fine to servers in TF2, and once I reentered the menu after joining a server the menu worked fine, but now I am much happier. I don't know what it is with these new drivers, but something is very $#@!ed up in wonderland.

Anyways, thanks to Wasp and Dog on making things clear enough for me to understand and clear up for myself. I'm not to worried about not having the newest drivers, I guess I can't play Crysis without new drivers, but since I don't own a copy I dont really care.

~FIZ

EDIT: haha I think I hung my mission accomplished banner to early. Gen II was not FIXED by the driver rollback, back to the choppy menus.

Post by **pkk** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 7:13 pm

163.71 works fine on Alleg, but sucks if you wanna play CoD4 1.5 online... /wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink.gif" />

Tried a few newer versions for my 8600GTS. They improved my FPS on CoD4 MP (from 5 to 60+ fps), but reduced them on Alleg down to 20-25 fps. /doh.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":doh:" border="0" alt="doh.gif" />

Evanl10 · Post by **Evanl10** » Mon Mar 24, 2008 6:17 am

I have a dual boot system with Vista Ultimate and XP pro. Allegiance, as mentioned, runs in very low fps on XP with the 8800 GT. Out of curiosity I install Allegiance on the Vista drive. Of course I have .net problems so I can't run ASGS, but I can launch Allegiance and go do the training mission. I get a nonstop 70fps while running it in Vista. This is with all the up to date drivers.

Just something I thought I'de share. Off to fix .net.

Dogbones · Post by **Dogbones** » Mon Mar 24, 2008 7:06 pm

The above is why I hold out some hope that nVidia will be able to 'fix' this, the Vista drivers are fine and the XP are not for the same card. There must be other old programs that have the same problem, that would give us a little more leverage for them to take a serious look at the problem.

I'd suggest filling in a bug report / support request with nVidia.

Grimmwolf_GB · Post by **Grimmwolf_GB** » Mon Mar 24, 2008 7:31 pm

I tried it in vista and had the same problems. Now Allegiance does not work on Vista anymore because of SP1 and I cannot be bothered to get it working again.

Post by **aem** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 6:03 am

I dual boot windows vista and xp. My motherboard has 2 pci-e x16 slots. I (sadly) just use vista now w/ my HD 3870 in the top slot. Would it work for me to throw an old video card into slot 2 and put those drivers on the XP partition and use a different video card for each OS?

Grimmwolf_GB · Post by **Grimmwolf_GB** » Fri Mar 28, 2008 12:11 pm

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_174.74.html

A new beta driver is out, It is supposed to fix some stuff. I will test it later tonight, if I find the time.