Buggy geforce 7800 gs drivers?

[v8440]

Hi all,

I just got and installed a bfg 7800 gs. I was messing around with medal of honor allied assault, and I noticed little flashes of some sort of artifact. I can't be much more specific-whatever it is flashes up for just a fraction of a second. Sometimes, especially if there's a lot of movement on the screen, it will lock totally up for a second, but not crash. Then the action snaps back into play as if nothing had happened. The radeon 9800 pro I just took out did not do any of this. So far as game settings, that's with everything maxed out except resolution. Selecting max resolution results in an error message saying it could not load openGL. One other thing-the fill rate seems to be really low. Just walking down a street in the village level results in very noticeable rippling at the sides of the screen.

I've tried backing off on various video settings in the game to see if one in particular affects it, and none seem to.

By the way, this is with the most current non-beta driver available from the nvidia website as of 11/27/06. The driver version is 6.14.10.9371. Anybody have any ideas what this could be? I mean, MOHAA ought to be a dead easy game for this card, even with all the eye candy turned on.

 

[Deadman93723]

Have you tried using different drivers? 93.71's are buggy, try 91.47 or try what I use Xtreme-G 92.91.

 

[Joeteck]

Hi all,

I just got and installed a bfg 7800 gs. I was messing around with medal of honor allied assault, and I noticed little flashes of some sort of artifact. I can't be much more specific-whatever it is flashes up for just a fraction of a second. Sometimes, especially if there's a lot of movement on the screen, it will lock totally up for a second, but not crash. Then the action snaps back into play as if nothing had happened. The radeon 9800 pro I just took out did not do any of this. So far as game settings, that's with everything maxed out except resolution. Selecting max resolution results in an error message saying it could not load openGL. One other thing-the fill rate seems to be really low. Just walking down a street in the village level results in very noticeable rippling at the sides of the screen.

I've tried backing off on various video settings in the game to see if one in particular affects it, and none seem to.

By the way, this is with the most current non-beta driver available from the nvidia website as of 11/27/06. The driver version is 6.14.10.9371. Anybody have any ideas what this could be? I mean, MOHAA ought to be a dead easy game for this card, even with all the eye candy turned on.

Thats also a classic sign of an overclocked card starting to show signs of failure.... If you are, back it down a little...

 

[v8440]

I've only tried two drivers-whatever came on the installation disk (I can't remember what that was) and the 9371's. I figured the 9371's would be good because they were the latest non-beta release. However, I will try one or both of those you mention. Which do you recommend?

 

[v8440]

Thats also a classic sign of an overclocked card starting to show signs of failure.... If you are, back it down a little...

Yeah, you're right. The card is overclocked slightly from the factory in this case. I have not overclocked it at all beyond what it runs right out of the box, and I won't until I get these issues solved. I used to overclock my 9800 pro early on when I was running it, and it would do almost exactly what this one does (minus the freezing up).

 

[the_cultie]

I use the 84.21 driver, I haven't tried any of the 90 series as people have been having the odd problem. I suggest you try the 84.21 release and see what happens. If not, then the card could be buggy.

 

[ziggo0]

Try using these. Thy are my prized 6x00 & 7x00 series drivers. I've found that games run the best on these vs alot of other drivers and still have great IQ.

http://www.distantnetwork.net/misc/XTreme-G 81.95.v2.rar

XG 81.95 V2

 

[Deadman93723]

I installed Xtreme-G 92.91 when I got my 7800GS and my performance has been so awesome, I have not bothered with trying any others. I mean 59FPS average in FEAR with the comp on High and the vid card on Maximum, seems like good drivers to me.

 

[v8440]

I tried the 84.21 drivers, and it got rid of the problem where watching any movie pegged cpu usage at 100% and put the computer in slow motion. (Yes, I tried killing the service that was using most of the cycles. That service was taskmgr, so killing it predictably resulted in...no task manager on screen. Computer was still slow.)

However, the terrible artifacts problem in MOHAA persists, and the game even crashed. Ziggo, I will try your drivers next.


*Edit* Those drivers are not for my card. When I ran the executable, it could not find any hardware compatible with the drivers. Oh well. I may have to rma the card to see if it's actually defective. It just seems so much more likely to be a driver issue, but I guess if 100 different drivers don't help...

 

[Deadman93723]

Something should have worked by now, I would say the card is a dud.

 

[v8440]

Yeah, maybe so. It's just weird that different drivers change the problems I'm having, but none so far totally eliminate them.

 

[Deadman93723]

What all drivers have you used? And do you use Drivercleaner Pro when you are un/re-installing drivers?

 

[v8440]

I have not tried drivercleaner pro-in fact, I've never heard of it. I'll give it a shot before giving up and rma'ing the card. I just ran dxdiag, and for the first time in my life, I got a failure. Here's a cut/paste of the pertinent part of the log file from that:


DDraw Status: Enabled
D3D Status: Enabled
AGP Status: Enabled
DDraw Test Result: All tests were successful.
D3D7 Test Result: Failure at step 32 (User verification of Direct3D rendering): HRESULT = 0x00000000 (error code)
D3D8 Test Result: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086a (3D not available)
D3D9 Test Result: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8876086a (3D not available)



The first failure, the D3D7 one about user verification is because the screen froze partway through the phase where the "microsoft direct x" cube is bouncing around. I had to hit control-alt-delete to get the screen where it asks whether you saw the cube or not. I chose "no", since it locked up while doing it. The other two errors were not based on any input I gave it, so those are probably actual outright test failures of some sort.

 

[Deadman93723]

Well, definatly use Drivercleaner Pro in safe mode after you uninstall the old drivers and before you install the new ones.

 

[kbtat2]

I would do what the others have already suggested, use driver cleaner pro.

The correct steps for use are:
1) Un-install old video driver
2) Reboot into safe mode
3) Run driver cleaner pro with the "Nvidia" tab selected.
4) Reboot into windows and install new driver.

Hopefully this works for you. If not then you have gotten a bad card and I would definitely RMA it quickly. I have mine overclocked quite a bit and there are no artifacts of any kind.

I, like Deadman, use the XG 92.91 drivers and they are by far the BEST driver I have used with this card.

Good Luck 8^)

 

[v8440]

Well, I used drivercleaner pro, and it did the same thing. I guess I better RMA the stupid card.

 

[Deadman93723]

Well, I used drivercleaner pro, and it did the same thing. I guess I better RMA the stupid card.

That sucks man, RMA's a such a hassle.

 

[v8440]

Update:

I put the card in a buddy's machine I was working on-a dell running xp pro with an XP 2200 in it, 768mb of ram. It worked fine! I guess it's not the card after all.

So, I reformatted my machine and reinstalled XP. No change at all. It must be a conflict with part of my hardware.

 

[Deadman93723]

What are your specs?

 

[v8440]

It's fixed! It turned out that it didn't like my old chipset driver. I updated all the motherboard drivers, and the card immediately started working fine. Then I found that my dvd rom would lock the machine up whenever it tried to read something, so on a hunch I rolled back the ide bus driver to the previous version. That fixed the dvd problem, so I finally have a machine that has no glitches and lets me play whatever game I want.

To give credit, I called the BFG tech support line, and the guy suggested updating the chipset driver. He hit that one on the head-I never thought of that on my own.