Nvidia Driver Release 163.67

[Cynicalking]

Get em' Right HERE

Just installed them, will give them a try. Release notes mention Bioshock improvements, Crysis support, and memory fixes with high setting. Hopefully the Alt-Tab bug has been fixed.

[moshpit]

Get em' Right HERE

Just installed them, will give them a try. Release notes mention Bioshock improvements, Crysis support, and memory fixes with high setting. Hopefully the Alt-Tab bug has been fixed.

Which Alt-Tab bug? You mean the Alt-Tab fix? As in having to Alt-Tab for 320mb users to get their performance back?

[VW_Factor]

Which Alt-Tab bug? You mean the Alt-Tab fix? As in having to Alt-Tab for 320mb users to get their performance back.

Ive given these a try this morning. Not that I was having problems with Bioshock, it runs great otherwise.

My problem is with EQ2, and having two cards in my machine. These made no difference with this.

Anyway.. Seem good thus far otherwise. (just tried some BF2142 as well, and all is good there too.)

[clerick]

Get em' Right HERE

Just installed them, will give them a try. Release notes mention Bioshock improvements, Crysis support, and memory fixes with high setting. Hopefully the Alt-Tab bug has been fixed.

The bug was fixed in a microsoft update in vista. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2177716,00.asp

[acroig]

Gotta love nV! They already have a Crysis performance driver!

I hear these boost performance in Bioshock and MOH:A so I'll give them a try later on after I finish downloading the ET:QW demo.

PS: Gracias chamo for the link!

[Cynicalking]

I believe that's a completely diferent bug. The Microsoft fix lowers game memory usage, the problem I'm mentioning is caused by bad video card memory management from the drivers themselves. It's been confirmed by Nvidia, and yes, I meant the Alt+Tab fix, not bug

[Vengeance]

Hey guys don't forget that if your running Vista Microsoft has 4 big hotfixes they put out for Geforce owners.

You can get them all from here. Microsoft Windows Vista Hotfixes

These should all be in the first service pack for vista.

[Cynicalking]

Gotta love nV! They already have a Crysis performance driver!

I hear these boost performance in Bioshock and MOH:A so I'll give them a try later on after I finish downloading the ET:QW demo.

PS: Gracias chamo for the link!

De nada my friend.

[acroig]

Vengie! Always nice to see you around man!

[Vengeance]

Vengie! Always nice to see you around man!

I took a few weeks off, but Rage is like a home away from home.

[acroig]

I took a few weeks off, but Rage is like a home away from home.

Dude, I'm glad you didn't leave us! We've lost sooo many good people in the last few months and I'm glad you're not one of them.

[Cynicalking]

OC isn't working for me and a few others. tried Rivatuner and ATITool. Well, memory does overclock, but the core and the shaders don't.

[acroig]

OC isn't working for me and a few others. tried Rivatuner and ATITool. Well, memory does overclock, but the core and the shaders don't.

No way! I'll try them later today and let you guys know.

[Cynicalking]

Found this searching about the OC issues:

Guys, I've got very good news for G80 owners. I've just examined overclocking interfaces of newly released 163.67 drivers and I was really pleased to see that NVIDIA finally added an ability of independent shader clock adjustment. As you probably know, with the past driver families the ForceWare automatically overclocked G80 shader domain synchronicallly with ROP domain using BIOS defined Shader/ROP clock ratio. Starting from 163.67 drivers internal ForceWare overclocking interfaces no longer scale shader domain clock when ROP clock is adjusted and the driver now provides completely independent shader clock adjustment interface. It means that starting from ForceWare 163.67 all overclocking tools like RivaTuner, nTune, PowerStrip or ATITool will adjust ROP clock only.
However, new revisions of these tools supporting new overclocking interfaces will probably allow you to adjust shader clock too. Now I've played with new interfaces and upcoming v2.04 will contain an experimental feature allowing power users to definie custom Shader/ROP ratio via the registry, so RT will clock shader domain together with ROP domain using user defined ratio.
And v2.05 will give you completely independent slider for adjusting shader clock independently of core clock.

[moshpit]

Wow!!! Now what do we do with that??? Does that mean we should up the shader clocks more or up the ROP clocks more? Which will be more beneficial? I can certainly see scenarios where shader upclocking would make a big difference, and vice versa, ROP clocks for older games. Which way to go? Now I'm confused

[acroig]

Wow!!! Now what do we do with that??? Does that mean we should up the shader clocks more or up the ROP clocks more? Which will be more beneficial? I can certainly see scenarios where shader upclocking would make a big difference, and vice versa, ROP clocks for older games. Which way to go? Now I'm confused

It has been my experience that the shader clock (which is high enough already) seems to halt the overclocking potential of the G80s. I truly welcome this as now every G80 owner can custom tune their overclocks!

[ChrisRay]

The shader processors will likely be more lenient to clock adjustments than the ROP processors. But when you dont overclock both your performance wont scale as linerarly. Either way you may be able to get more performance in certain titles by adjusting the ROPS rather than the shader processors. It's definately an interesting feature to mess with.

Chris

[acroig]

It's definately an interesting feature to mess with.

Chris

I can't wait to mess with this. Too cool.

[nomore]

Get em' Right HERE

You can get them all from here. Microsoft Windows Vista Hotfixes

and the new vista drivers for 650i sli motherboard: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_32_15.08.html

I will try to install all these drivers over the weekend, this is just too many drivers for me at once.

[mdrnhl]

Ouch....Warhammer: Age of Reckoning Beta crashes hard for me on start up, after loading these drivers (XP Pro 32bit, eVGA 8800 GTS 320mb Superclocked).

Will try and roll back and see if thats what was definitely doing it.

[mdrnhl]

Ouch....Warhammer: Age of Reckoning Beta crashes hard for me on start up, after loading these drivers (XP Pro 32bit, eVGA 8800 GTS 320mb Superclocked).

Will try and roll back and see if thats what was definitely doing it.

Had to roll back to 163.44 to get it working again

[mrHappy]

Which Alt-Tab bug? You mean the Alt-Tab fix? As in having to Alt-Tab for 320mb users to get their performance back?

Haven't tried the drivers myself, but from what I've read the texture eviction bug should be fixed in this version

[moshpit]

Haven't tried the drivers myself, but from what I've read the texture eviction bug should be fixed in this version

!!!! Really? OMG, that would be SOOO cool! Do you remember where you read that? I don't have my 320mb anymore to test with, and I've never suffered it on my 640mb card, but I have quite a few friends on the 320mb card who this would be of GREAT interest to.

[mrHappy]

!!!! Really? OMG, that would be SOOO cool! Do you remember where you read that? I don't have my 320mb anymore to test with, and I've never suffered it on my 640mb card, but I have quite a few friends on the 320mb card who this would be of GREAT interest to.

nVnews link

[moshpit]

nVnews link

Ty, + reps

[DeathKnight]

Too late for me now. I ditched my 320MB'er quite a while ago, hehe. Glad to hear Nvidia finally figured out the problem (or likely were told what the problem was) and fixed it.

Not sure I'm going to touch these yet. I don't feel like screwing around with more overclock options and not being able to use ATITool right now for everything. The 163.44's are working just fine for me (no Bioshock performance issues either with everything maxed).

[TRD Supra]

would these be good to try on my 7800GT?

[acroig]

Not sure I'm going to touch these yet. I don't feel like screwing around with more overclock options and not being able to use ATITool right now for everything. The 163.44's are working just fine for me (no Bioshock performance issues either with everything maxed).

I'll wait until Unwinder realeases a new RivaTuner with separate clocks support.

[Jokerzwild]

They're working A-OK for me in XP right now, overclocking and all (using RT v2.03). Can't really tell any differences in anything though. I haven't tried them in Vista yet though cos that's where I heard the troubles are with these.

@TRD They're working fine on my machine that has a 7800gt in it. No change that I can see in performance or anything, but the only game that's been played on it since I installed them has been that free PoP game, and 3DMark06 where my score is virtually the same as it was with the 44's.

The new overclocking methods seem really cool, can't wait to see what Unwinder does with the next version of RT. Oh and great news about the alt-tab bug/fix, that'll make ALOT of 8800 owners happy.

[TRD Supra]

They're working A-OK for me in XP right now, overclocking and all (using RT v2.03). Can't really tell any differences in anything though. I haven't tried them in Vista yet though cos that's where I heard the troubles are with these.

@TRD They're working fine on my machine that has a 7800gt in it. No change that I can see in performance or anything, but the only game that's been played on it since I installed them has been that free PoP game, and 3DMark06 where my score is virtually the same as it was with the 44's.

The new overclocking methods seem really cool, can't wait to see what Unwinder does with the next version of RT. Oh and great news about the alt-tab bug/fix, that'll make ALOT of 8800 owners happy.

so your 7800GT on XP, so are the drivers having trouble in vista with a 7800GT?

[the_sextein]

I just tried these drivers out in Bioshock with my 8800GTX. My FPS are exactly the same but I did notice something new. The AA is now working on all surfaces. Wall textures, Door frames, just about every surface in the game is being smoothed out. It looks like they managed to get AA to properly do it's job with this update. The catch is that it is compleatly unplayable. My FPS used to drop from 50FPS to 38FPS when I enabled 4X AA. Now my FPS drop all the way down to 12FPS. Turning on 4X AA gives me a 31FPS loss to my minimum frame rate. The game is unplayable with AA. I can't understand why 4XAA would cause such a large performance loss. Maybe dual 8800 Ultras overclocked could handle this without dropping below 30FPS but I doubt even that kind of power could handle it. Hopefully it's just a bug or something.

[Vengeance]

Drivers seem great to me in everything I have played so far.

[VW_Factor]

Drivers seem great to me in everything I have played so far.

After I got my EQ2 bug worked out, everything is golden here as well.

[cybrsage]

After I got my EQ2 bug worked out, everything is golden here as well.

What was the bug and fix?

[VW_Factor]

What was the bug and fix?

Depending on driver set, if SLI was enabled even if the application profile was set to Single GPU mode, the game would stutter and chop horribly regardless of graphics settings, etc.

These last two sets of Betas, if I disable SLI in the Set SLI Config. option, the game runs great. Its a work around for the time being, as I cant have SLI enabled, use single GPU and then just use SLIxAA (that was my hope, because EQ2 is CPU bound).

Anyway, heres hoping a future driver will clear that issue up.

[cybrsage]

Depending on driver set, if SLI was enabled even if the application profile was set to Single GPU mode, the game would stutter and chop horribly regardless of graphics settings, etc.

These last two sets of Betas, if I disable SLI in the Set SLI Config. option, the game runs great. Its a work around for the time being, as I cant have SLI enabled, use single GPU and then just use SLIxAA (that was my hope, because EQ2 is CPU bound).

Anyway, heres hoping a future driver will clear that issue up.

Ah, ok. Was curious as my wife's EQ2 game studders. Her system is old, though, and needs to be replaced and she will not let me turn down the eye candy too much...

Was hoping for a "just do this" miracle...money for her PC comes from the "upgrade the HTPC" fund

[Jokerzwild]

so your 7800GT on XP, so are the drivers having trouble in vista with a 7800GT?

On the machine I have the 7800gt in I don't have Vista installed so I don't know. If I get time tonight I'll throw the 7800gt in my other pc that has Vista on it and check it out for ya. What games would you want me to check?

[VW_Factor]

Ah, ok. Was curious as my wife's EQ2 game studders. Her system is old, though, and needs to be replaced and she will not let me turn down the eye candy too much...

Was hoping for a "just do this" miracle...money for her PC comes from the "upgrade the HTPC" fund

Unless you are lookin for more AF, AA, or running more particle effects, more CPU power scales this game better, and more RAM. Definately look into this aspect of it.

[ChrisRay]

Depending on driver set, if SLI was enabled even if the application profile was set to Single GPU mode, the game would stutter and chop horribly regardless of graphics settings, etc.

These last two sets of Betas, if I disable SLI in the Set SLI Config. option, the game runs great. Its a work around for the time being, as I cant have SLI enabled, use single GPU and then just use SLIxAA (that was my hope, because EQ2 is CPU bound).

Anyway, heres hoping a future driver will clear that issue up.

Did the profile I give you not work with the new drivers? Since I cant reproduce the stuttering. It's hard for me to troubleshoot it. But the profile I gave you should have solved the performance deficits you were getting.

Chris

[VW_Factor]

Did the profile I give you not work with the new drivers? Since I cant reproduce the stuttering. It's hard for me to troubleshoot it. But the profile I gave you should have solved the performance deficits you were getting.

Chris

It got better performance, however it did not solve the stuttering. The stuttering occurred regardless of graphics settings. I might be able to fraps what is going on with it. Anyway, its not that frame rate is bad, the framerate will be great. However it chops and stutters in random areas (some of the stuttering gets a pause of a full second or two). When its not in the middle of a stutter, the framerate however is very good. Edit : To be more clear the stutter isnt a period of bad framerate (such as a sudden weird drop in frames from say 60 to 15), its a full on pausing of teh framerate, for periods of at least a half second or more. So I can be toolin around at 60 fps, and then I get a pausing for about 10 seconds of time, then 30 seconds later, it will happen again.

I started a support ticket with eVGA and it sounds like their support guy was able to replicate the issue on similar hardware to my own (and my wifes machine). It may very well just be an issue with my hardware arrangement. At any rate, eVGA has gotten the information to nvidia (or so support said). Of course, I shouldnt expect a fix for it anytime soon. Who knows, maybe the live update this morning cleared up the issue? I'll give 'er another whack again.

Anyway, if you wish to continue about it, lets get into PM. I dont want to get this thread too off topic.