8800gts 320 problem

[lil bastard]

I recently bought this card and it feels about twice as fast as my old x1800xt, but after playing oblivion for example, the frame rate will just drop drastically and it will stay that way till I quit and restart the game. If I go to the exact same spot the frame rates will be excellent when I restart.

Does anyone else experience this?

I think it has something to do with the video memory since it just keeps growing. When I log it, it will start at around 200 and slowly grow. Once it gets more than the 320 of local memory the card just dies like its not clearing the memory for the new textures or something.

I realize its the low memory card but I really dont think it should have the effect it has. Im talking 2-3fps in an area where I normally get around 50.

Thanks for any help!

[Jokerzwild]

Which drivers are you using?

[Nascar24]

I had my own problems with an 8800GTS which is going back. I feel it was more hardware problem then anything, Tried 3 different drivers and the computer just wouldnt shutdown clean. Tried everything. Its going back and we will see what the 2900XT has to offer tomorrow. I really liked the card other than that though.

[Qb2k5]

What res are you gaming at and what OS and drivers are you using? Is oblivion pacthed?

According to this Anandtech review ( http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2926&p=3 ), on an WinXP machine theres really not a huge difference between the 320 and 640mb gpu card.

From the chart it looks like theres only a 10% difference.

BTW, I see you live in Boca. Thats about 35 mins away from me.

[lil bastard]

158.19 drivers
Windows is a fresh install.
game at 1920x1200 0aa 8af
the card runs it beautifully everywhere (even with 2xaa) until I play for a little but. Then it will just slow down to nothing until I restart the game.

Honestly the lowest framerates I see are about 30fps until the problem shows up.

Oblivion is patched....

I believe it did it with stalker too. I was almost done with the game before I got the card. I started playing everything was great I was impressed with the cards power, then on to the last level. From there it was s l o w.... I thought maybe the level was just to graphically intense or something but now that I think about it, it was probably a similar thing happening.

[moshpit]

I haven't experienced that with my 320mb card, but then I'm not trying to run it on a 24" monitor either, hehehe!

[ChrisRay]

You might wanna check your power connectors and ensure its firmly seated in the PCIE slot. Loss of power could cause the system to temporarily drop its the 3D clocks to protect the hardware.

Chris

[OzzieBloke]

Originally Posted by ChrisRay

You might wanna check your power connectors and ensure its firmly seated in the PCIE slot. Loss of power could cause the system to temporarily drop its the 3D clocks to protect the hardware.

Chris

Also, overheating.

[DeathKnight]

I'm surprised at the responses here. This is a known and fairly widespread issue with the 320MB GTS's. It's a memory leak/memory management issue with the drivers. It's been lessened quite a bit with the latest 158.19's, but it's still there. I've been dealing with it ever since I got my 320MB GTS.

There are a number of existing threads on here discussing the problem. You can also find quite a few people over at Guru3D, NVNews, etc that have the same problems with their 320MB GTS's. It's not a power supply problem and it's not overheating.

[lil bastard]

Originally Posted by DeathKnight

I'm surprised at the responses here. This is a known and fairly widespread issue with the 320MB GTS's. It's a memory leak/memory management issue with the drivers. It's been lessened quite a bit with the latest 158.19's, but it's still there. I've been dealing with it ever since I got my 320MB GTS.

There are a number of existing threads on here discussing the problem. You can also find quite a few people over at Guru3D, NVNews, etc that have the same problems with their 320MB GTS's. It's not a power supply problem and it's not overheating.

Thanks for all the responses.

I dont frequent many other forums and a quick google search didnt give me much. Do you know when they plan on having it fixed? Its quite annoying to me and I dont see it listed on the nvidia list of known problems.

[DeathKnight]

No idea when or if it will be totally fixed. I have yet to see any kind of acknowledgement by anyone from Nvidia that there's something screwy with 320MB GTS's. Then again it's not surprising given their current track record for timely support and fixing of 8800 issues in general.

[acroig]

Have you guys tried the new 158.22 drivers? May help.

[lil bastard]

Maybe, it says in the release notes it fixed turbocache on the 8 series gpu's. Maybe that has been the problem? Ill try them tonight when I get home from work.

[moshpit]

I'm quite curious about this question myself.

[Vengeance]

Originally Posted by moshpit

I'm quite curious about this question myself.

Me too, I wont lie. The only 2 games I have really been playing is WoW and Supreme Commander. And both work great.

[moshpit]

Same here on the SupCom part. Runs like a dream overall now. But I still detect occasional pauses in Stalker that are concerning. I'm thinking they're more system level then GPU level tho, because FEAR ExP is every bit as graphically demanding as Stalker and never pauses or jitters in any way, it runs smooth as silk (smoother even )

[DeathKnight]

Originally Posted by acroig

Have you guys tried the new 158.22 drivers? May help.

Just tried them. Doesn't help

[lil bastard]

Yes, I tried them too and it didnt help. Actually these drivers made everything seem unsmooth, even when the frames were good.

This is the response I got from nvidia on this problem....

Hello Nick,

Welcome back to NVIDIA Customer Care.

Nick, I thank you for the information. I request you to do the following---

1. Please uninstall the presently installed driver and install the older 97.02 driver version. Please let us know if there is any significant slowdown with this driver. The 97.02 driver is available for download from the link below---

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_97.02.html

2. If you have not already downloaded and installed the latest patches for the games that you have problem with , please do so. This might be one of the reasons that the game performance decreases.

Please let us know if your issue is resolved.

Regards,
NVIDIA Customer Care.

But I have yet to try these drivers.

[DeathKnight]

Yeah, the 158.22's made the slowdowns more frequent for me. I'll probably go back to the 158.19's.

Interesting that they recommend going all the way back to an extremely old driver.

[Sephic]

Hi

I'm having exactly same slowdowns in Oblivion and Test Drive Unlimited. In Oblivion suddenly fps drops from 60-70 to 18-20. And when i alt+tab to the desktop i have noticed from riva tuner that on the time when fps drops, the memory usage has grown from about 140-192 to 260-340. Have used 158.19 and 158.22 driver and i'm on win XP SP2. PSU is 500W Fortron Bluestorm II, CPU e6300@def.
Has anyone tried those 97.02 drivers allready ?
I can't try them, cause 8800 series cards won't work on this mobo with any lower driver than 158.19. Mobo is Asrock 775 Dual-VSTA btw.

Sorry if my english grammar is bad.

[Lupine]

Originally Posted by Sephic

Hi

I'm having exactly same slowdowns in Oblivion and Test Drive Unlimited. In Oblivion suddenly fps drops from 60-70 to 18-20. And when i alt+tab to the desktop i have noticed from riva tuner that on the time when fps drops, the memory usage has grown from about 140-192 to 260-340. Have used 158.19 and 158.22 driver and i'm on win XP SP2. PSU is 500W Fortron Bluestorm II, CPU e6300@def.
Has anyone tried those 97.02 drivers allready ?
I can't try them, cause 8800 series cards won't work on this mobo with any lower driver than 158.19. Mobo is Asrock 775 Dual-VSTA btw.

Sorry if my english grammar is bad.

Welcome to Rage3D Sephic. Your post got stuck in the mod queue. I cleared it and removed the duplicates. Apologies for the hassle and please let me know if you have any further issues.

[lil bastard]

The 97.02 Drivers dont fix anything. Ill keep you up to date on what nvidia tells me, otherwise if I dont get some kind of good answer from them in the next few days im going to return the card before the 14day return period is up.

[bpoag]

Originally Posted by Sephic

Hi

I'm having exactly same slowdowns in Oblivion and Test Drive Unlimited. In Oblivion suddenly fps drops from 60-70 to 18-20. And when i alt+tab to the desktop i have noticed from riva tuner that on the time when fps drops, the memory usage has grown from about 140-192 to 260-340. Have used 158.19 and 158.22 driver and i'm on win XP SP2. PSU is 500W Fortron Bluestorm II, CPU e6300@def.
Has anyone tried those 97.02 drivers allready ?
I can't try them, cause 8800 series cards won't work on this mobo with any lower driver than 158.19. Mobo is Asrock 775 Dual-VSTA btw.

Sorry if my english grammar is bad.

Got the same exact problem here, except w/ Half-Life 2 Deathmatch.

Reboot the box? Everythings fine for about an hour...then slowly, performance begins to degrade. Leave the box on overnight, and it borders on unplayable. Stock maps, no mods, no overclocking, no tweaks, no funny business. Out of the box, the 8800 GTS is completely ****ed, given the current state of the drivers.

I've replaced a power supply, added a sound card, upgraded my BIOS, and probably tested at least 4 versions of drivers for the 8800, and they all exhibit the same problem.. The card runs smooth as silk for about an hour, then it becomes progressively more and more jerky/uneven with time. It's deeply annoying.

At this point, given how long the 8800GTS has been out, I would not reccomend this card to others, nor would I reccomend nVidia to others. They're severely, severely dropping the ball here.

System specs:

Asus M2V-TVM
625W PSU (2x12V rails, 19+20A)
1GB RAM (2x512M @ 667 MHz)
eVGA 8800GTS 320MB
22" ViewSonic VX2255 LCD, 1680x1050 @ 60 Hz
XP Pro SP2.

[Sephic]

Thanx.

Any news fom Nvidia yet ?

[Hapooh]

I had the exact same problem, but not in oblivion but in FEAR... I had a EVGA 320 OC and was playing at 1680 x 1050. Did everything to try and resolve it but couldn't . My friend had the exact card and had similar issues in other games. We both returned it and got the Foxconn 640 OC version at newegg.. and completely fixed any slow down issues. I think it's the drivers and 320 memory that's the issue. But the 640 version definately resolved the issues...

[lil bastard]

Well, nvidia sent my complaint to "level 2" tech support and I havent heard back from them yet.

Personally I dont think that the 640mb version fixed the problem. I think it just has enough extra memory that the problem cant affect the card with current games. Thats my opinion though.

[Sephic]

That is good, hope to hear something soon.

Heard that there was somekind of Oblivion texture mod that used up even a 768MB GTX texture memory.

[moshpit]

I've now seen the slowdown issue in Stalker and SupCom both. Been trying multiple things. May have found part of the problem tho, but it was an Intel chipset driver issue and I have that ironed out now. We'll see if that helps or not for me.

[acroig]

Originally Posted by moshpit

I've now seen the slowdown issue in Stalker and SupCom both.

I get stuttering in Stalker but someone said it was writing to disk? Is that the same issue you get mosh?

[moshpit]

no, it's a FPS drop that is easily cleared up by simply going into the games video CP and changing any random setting that forces the screen to refresh, and the FPS is magically back to normal. It's a driver bug, I'm positive.