nVidia Forceware 81.85 WHQL - October 20, 2005

Yay more new drivers, this time its an official, there has been a speed up from the 81.82 drivers, heaps of crash to desktop fixes, increased SLI support etc.

Grab em' Here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_81.85.html

But does it stop Quake 4 hard-rebooting my machine every 10 minutes?



(hint... the answer is NO)

Boy Nvidia really seem to have lost their way - I'm sticking with ATI for a while. Drivers ARE important guys not just hardware.

Quake4 works fine on my new nvidia card. Looks like an old quake game with a few shaders and shadows on low res textures.

vinylpusher: Erm, If it was a driver problem you would see a nice phat blue screen relating to some random nv dll, 1) Its caus your machines overclocked, 2) You have a really poor installation of windows.

Evak: yeah I agree, Quake 4 did look a little less spiffy than I expected, come on guys, at least make it somewhat of a step up from Doom3, not a step backwards, authough, the vehicles were cool.

LeidenK:

1) It's actually running at stock speeds at the moment because I'm taking advantage of AMD's PowerNow to keep power consumption down (there's a good reason for this, but too lengthy to explain).
2) No I haven't. Trust me on this.

Not every crash can be caught by the kernel (in order to display the BSOD). Upon further investigation, it may be more related to the sound subsystem (even though I have the latest drivers). There's a workaround (lowering sound hardwre acceleration).

Still strange that Doom 3 didn't suffer this problem.

Ahh ok, mhmm thats definately weird, I was thinking since its overclocked there might be some components that are being stressed for instance a PCI device (soundcard?). I heard you can change the PCI latency and that fixes some sound problems, but I think thats more to do with latency, noise etc.

A hard reboot is to do with the hardware being stressed or something, I think a soft-reset would be to do with Windows/Drivers. You can try looking in event viewer as it usually logs some errors,

Thats weird, considering they both use the same engine, did Quake 4 use any modifications to the Doom3 engine?

That's why I will stick with Nvidia. Although ATIs hardware sometimes is very impressive, the drivers are just crap compared to the Nvidia drivers.<--- period

Like the beta that came before it, nice to not have any pausing in GPU heavy games....but even this version of the drivers frigs up all the fogging in Final FantasyXI......I swear I be having a seizure with the fog alternating between the trees & background every other frame next time I run through Zi'Tah in it.

I think with the current threat from ATI's X1800XT's nVidia are really getting serious about pushing every last drop of performance from their drivers. Authough, they should have been more serious about it 6 years back with the Geforce 2 TI, but hell, better now than never. Isnt it great how the two companies (ATI and NV) struggle for the market giving the end user cheaper and more cost effective products :)