GeForce 91.31 Drivers, caution

Post by **Enjay** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 0:03

Not strictly GZdoom, I know, but people here may wish to be alerted about this. (Or perhaps it should have been in Off Topic?)

A couple of days ago, I DL'd and installed the newest NVidia Drivers. I found them problematic, and my experience is not uncommon, according to the NVidia forums.

First off, the download size - it's 40 MB! Now, it's always ticked me off that NVidia drivers are fairly large downloads due to the fact they consolidate the drivers for all their cards into the one distribution. So, even if you only actually need a couple of files to get your card updated, you have to do a full 20 MB download to get drivers for dozens of cards you simply don't own and all the interface related stuff etc. NVidia tout this as a good way to do things. Good for them, not the end customer - certainly not one on a modem (which thankfully I'm not). Anyway, the newest DL is over 40MB now - twice the size of previous versions. A single file 4x bigger than my first HD just to get my graphics card working!

Anyway, although I didn't experience too many of the nasty issues, there have been reports of colour-banding on the screen and a number of other graphical anomalies such as a "shimmering" effect like a heat haze (when there wasn't supposed to be one).

The new control panel is pretty awful looking. It is a largish window, with huge icons but when you click the icons, often you get only one or two options or even no options at all. These could easily be presented in a tiny little screen, but instead you are faced with a huge white window with one line of text and a picture on it. So, it has limited functionality in many of the areas and looks unpleasant too.

Sometimes, if other programs had been running, if I played GZDoom, I would quit the game and be left facing a totally black screen. Windows was still running but I couldn't see it and I had to log on and off like a blind man using keystrokes. This black screen is a commonly reported problem over at NVidia.

Finally, when you install the drivers, the next time you restart, you will probably get a warning bubble about SLI from the system tray telling you that one of your GPUs have been removed and SLI has been disabled. If you click the button you get taken to a website basically advertising SLI. What happens is if you only have one GPU, even if your mother board can only support one and you have disabled dual GPU support, you get warned that a GPU has been removed - every time you re-boot! Loads of people have had this problem. You can search around on the NVidia site and there is a downloadable registry tweak that stops it (if you look hard enough) but the only conclusion I can come up with is that this is clumsy adware. NVidia are encouraging you to buy a second GPU so that you can get all the benefits of SLI. It's a really annoying nag.

Anyway, after the above fiasco, I have gone back to 84.21 which I found to be a good set of stable drivers. I feel as if I have gotten control of my machine back. Although, aside from the issues mentioned, it felt like 91.31 was a reasonable driver, I can now feel a lack of clunkyness and glitchyness that was present with the 91.31 drivers. So, my advice, steer clear of them unless you are having problems with your current setup.

Xtife · Post by **Xtife** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 2:09

are you talking about beta or stable drivers?
either way, this is very good to know and will pass it on

thanks

SlayeR · Post by **SlayeR** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 3:16

Yeah I tried some 91.xx beta drivers and got the same thing. That new control panel is terrible

Post by **wildweasel** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 5:01

I wonder how that SLI warning would affect and actual SLI system? Still though, the black screens and such are enough for me to skip this driver - after all, I can run Oblivion with my current drivers, so why bother upgrading?

Post by **Enjay** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 9:01

Xtife wrote:are you talking about beta or stable drivers?
either way, this is very good to know and will pass it on

thanks

The "stable" ones. They went gold a few days ago. I "upgraded" because there was a minor issue with the newest version of FRAPS and the previous drivers.

wildweasel wrote:I wonder how that SLI warning would affect and actual SLI system?

If you only have one GPU installed, you will get the message. You can only not get the message if you have a full SLI systems with both GPUs up and running properly, apparently.

chaoscentral · Post by **chaoscentral** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 17:54

what ticks me off about the SLI, is that it says its disabled, even though I have an AGP card where its not possible...

Post by **Enjay** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 21:05

Indeed. Same situation as me and many other people. If you are otherwise happy with the driver, but want to disable the message copy the following into a text file:

Code: Select all

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\MediaCenterTray]
"NvCplDisableBalloonNotifications"=dword:00000001

Call it anythingyoulike.reg then double click it to merge it with your registry. That should remove the nag. But I'd recommend going back to 84.21 myself.

Xtife · Post by **Xtife** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 21:47

anyword whether they acknowledged that they know of the problems and/or said there are fixes?

Post by **Enjay** » Tue Jun 27, 2006 21:54

All the problems I have highlighted were known about during the beta phase and well reported then. There is no question they know about the problems. They couldn't fail to miss them on their forums. For what ever reason, they didn't fix them for the proper release.