Vista Forceware 101.41 BETA (SLI for 6/7/8)

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Frosteh

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First SLI drivers for Vista for the 6/7 range.

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_rel70betadriver.html

Release Highlights:

* Beta driver that adds support for NVIDIA SLI™ support on GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs
* Improved OpenGL performance
* Improved NVIDIA SLI performance at high resolutions
* General application compatibility fixes
* This driver supports the following features:
o Single GPU support
+ DirectX 9 support for GeForce 6/7/8 series GPUs
+ DirectX 10 support for GeForce 8800 GPUs
+ OpenGL support for GeForce 6/7/8 series GPUs
o NVIDIA SLI support
+ DirectX 9 support for GeForce 6/7/8 series GPUs
+ OpenGL support for GeForce 6/7/8 series GPUs
o NVIDIA PureVideo™ HD technology
* DirectX 10 NVIDIA SLI support for GeForce 8800 GPUs will be available in a future driver
* If you would like to be notified of upcoming drivers for Windows Vista, please subscribe to the newsletter
* Please read the release notes for more information on product support, feature limitations, and known compatibility issues
Click to expand...

Enjoy!
 
I have texture corruption and serious FPS drop (to 1-2 FPS) in CoH, on the other hand source games seems to be running very well.

I have CS:S in 1680 1050 with 4xAA and 8xAF with max settins and getting 60 fps.
 
Maybe I'm going crazy or missing something, but I think I'm seeing a huge increase in frames with FEAR. I'd go as far as to say that it's now running as well as it did in XP. Granted, I only played around with it for about 10 minutes, but it's infinitely better than it was before updating.

Edit: I wonder if Warhammer 40000 works now... I'll test it out.

Edit 2: Okay, I tried Warhammer and no dice... maybe it's really up to Relic to fix that one. But I did try Far Cry and that had much better performance as well... so perhaps Nvidia has finally done something useful. Granted, this wasn't running as well as XP, but it was at least playable now. Hmm... maybe Jade Empire actually works moderately well now...

Edit 3: Guys, go get this update. Unless my computer hit its head on something... magical, this update seems to bring a serious performance upgrade with it. Jade Empire was unplayable before, but now I'm playing it at 1600 X 1200 with everything but AA turned on with my 7800GTX without any issue whatsoever. It was a slideshow before even with the settings reduced significantly. I was close to reverting to XP since I couldn't play any games reliably, but this shows that there's definitely hope for Vista in the near future. Some games seem like they're running as well as they did in XP if not better and everything else I've tried has performed much, much better.

I'm happy.
 
Damnit! No hdr+aa yet, just tried it in oblivion forced in the control panel to 8xQ no go :mad:

How the hell hard is it to make this work?
 
Orthos is at 17 hours so my system should be stable...
Gonna try these drivers out and give them a whirl... (crosses fingers)
 
downloading now....lets see if my CSS performance goes back up to 190fps from the 70fps its at now...lol

EDIT: So i played CSS a little. at 1024x768 without AA I'm getting 186fps... w/ 4x MSAA I get 67fps. Seems like where it was in Win2k. So....DOWNLOAD THESE DRIVERS
 
markt435 said:
downloading now....lets see if my CSS performance goes back up to 190fps from the 70fps its at now...lol

EDIT: So i played CSS a little. at 1024x768 without AA I'm getting 186fps... w/ 4x MSAA I get 67fps. Seems like where it was in Win2k. So....DOWNLOAD THESE DRIVERS
Click to expand...

So it's not just me then... yes, these drivers are what we've been waiting for... it's nice that we got something decent after 1 month since I was afraid we'd be waiting half a year for something functional... it'd be truly amazing though if we actually saw tangible performance gains in XP in another month. Wishful thinking perhaps...
 
Well CS:S and WoW are playing just fine... but Quake 4 is a different story. It seems my mouse is now really choppy and all of the fire effects are all big black circles...

As soon as I can take a screenshot I'll post them, but everything else seems to be running great (glad I'm not a Quake 4 fan)
 
hmm...hope they didn't fuck with opengl too much then. i know it says improved performance but you never know...i still got rtcw and wolf et on here. those are my only two opengl games.

then again, rtcw had a stutter problem with the previous drivers. hope thats fixed. odd thing was et didn't.
 
So does this mean my 7950GX2 will perform at 100% now? Anything less, even 95% and no dice.
 
noticed no difference in average fps in coh test or source test
 
Symon14 said:
So does this mean my 7950GX2 will perform at 100% now? Anything less, even 95% and no dice.
Click to expand...

Both cores work as this card relys on SLI to function with both cores, there might be a few performance issues where SLI isn't giving the best performnace possible, but these are beta so that is to be expected.

I got 8095 in 3dmark06 in Vista Ultimate with my rig (see sig)
 
wtf...i just downloaded it from nvidia's site at over 1mb/s.....I downloaded some forceware drivers for a friend a few days ago and it was goin at 30k/s....

Will try and report back :)
 
ok, so far i've discovered that multi-gpu mode is not on by default, not a big deal but requires a restart. loaded up half-life ep: 1 and it ran like crap (20fps). not sure why yet. I'm gonna mess around with a few more games and post back.

update, i just ran bf2142 and it crashed with a weird memory dump error that i've never seen b4. i should have saved it but vista was accessing my hd like crazy and causing big time slow downs.
 
well I guess performance is more important that actually making a stable desktop.... :rolleyes:

For the love of god NV needs to get something right, driver wise.

stillfreakingerrors.jpg
 
Beta, huh? So now NVIDIA can't even afford to hire some real beta testers, they have to exploit their customers? Wonderful. :rolleyes: I'm ashamed to say that I used NVIDIA products successfully for over ten years.

This whole scandal is sickening. ATI and NVIDIA are like the Democrats and Republicans right now, both are so horrible I don't want to support either, and they both suck equally badly. NVIDIA has hardware and no drivers, ATI has drivers and no hardware. I wonder how XGI parts perform?
 
InorganicMatter said:
Beta, huh? So now NVIDIA can't even afford to hire some real beta testers, they have to exploit their customers? Wonderful. :rolleyes: I'm ashamed to say that I used NVIDIA products successfully for over ten years.
Click to expand...

Although I do understand where you are coming from regarding Nvidia's futility in handling their Vista drivers, you are not being forced to use Beta drivers. Most PC companies always put up beta drivers for customers, if they want to try them, and this has been going on for years. The keyword here is IF... there is no exploitation here.

Now, I did get some marginal improvements in NBA Live 2007 and MVP Baseball 2005 (with the MLB07 Mod). No more stuttering! Hopefully the non-beta drivers fix the desktop issue.
 
Messed around with Far Cry and FEAR some more, and oddly, I was able to crank the resolution up to 1920 X 1200 from 1024 X 768 and I noticed a minimal drop in frame rates... I know that Far Cry had more trouble than this on XP... maybe I'm just going crazy though.
 
the battlefield series is simply unbearable playing with my 7950gx2 on vista. sli support is now enabled and both cores are being used but i keep getting major stuttering even though my framerates are relatively high. i mostly blame vista at this point. nvidia's latest beta drivers are worlds ahead of the previous wqhl drivers for vista but its still unacceptable to me at this point to play any games on vista. back to xp for a while.
 
Just thought you guys might like to know overclocking works in windows vista with these drivers.... you just have to use ATI Tool 0.27 beta :D I am so happy
 
ATI tool more or less allows overclocking on all driver versions, do don't need these drivers specifically for ATI Tool 0.27 to work.
 
Enigma said:
Just thought you guys might like to know overclocking works in windows vista with these drivers.... you just have to use ATI Tool 0.27 beta :D I am so happy
Click to expand...

Who cares if the freaking windows drivers crash every 15 minutes? I am about 1 hour from turning this 8800GTX into an item on the FS forum. Lets see..... a X1950Pro and Asus DH Deluxe to replace my 8800GTX and EVGA 680i motherboard. I bet I can actually make some money from this transaction.
 
I thought they were going to fix the flat panel scaling, not completely grey it out and make it more useless. retarded.
 
i still get brief corruption at startup/login screen. i thought that was supposed to be fixed, too?
 
anyone get a black screen (no signal to monitor, actually) after installing these? going back to 100.65s fixes the problem. (Vista Ultimate x86, 7900GT)
 
sumofatguy said:
I thought they were going to fix the flat panel scaling, not completely grey it out and make it more useless. retarded.
Click to expand...

I agree, the drivers pdf say its fixed for 8800GTX but then it says its not available in the contol panel. Well is it fixed or not, Nvidia? I guessed not. This has been broken since 97 series showed up under XP. It's about time they fix it.
 
Can you guys try to update your windows performance index?

with the 101.41 drivers, this errors out at the D3D alpha blending tests for me. I submitted a bug report on it. 100.65 works fine with it.
 
wow everything works fine for me.. that sucks for the SLI ppl though. good thing i haven't upgraded to that yet.
 
Are people with 7 Series in SLI actually gaining performance in there games they have tried out with these? I'm having no performance increases at all, or barely noticable.

x64 Vista
2x7800GTX 512s
x2 4400

FEAR I gained 5fps to the avg score, 10 on the max with SLI enabled
HL2 Lost Coast Stress Test - Same score as with a single card
Everquest 2 - No performance increase vs a single card, in fact I run two instances on this machine usually, with the 100.65s it was no problem, however with these new beta drivers it is a choppy nightmare even on the lowest settings, basically making it unplayable.

I have enabled the SLI bar when testing the above, the most it moves is in FEAR, in EQ2 it stays a small rectangle and really doesn't move at all. Half Life two the bar barely moves also.

Hopefully the next few revisions of these will concentrate on performance now that they have seemingly figured out how to activate SLI :rolleyes: Bleh. Back to 100.65s for me.
 
Well, i am happy... Sleep mode in Vista64 finally works for me! All previous drivers would not let my system wake up. The video card never re-initialized. Also, tested in WoW... looks good.

Woops... Vista assesment does NOT work for me... well as long as my games play and sleep works... ill live with it.
 
I installed these yesterday and got a BSOD in under 5 minutes with only windows explorer open.
I havent hardly installed any software on this build - just did clean Install Friday afternoon.
Got another BSOD trying to uninstall drivers and havent had time to bang on it more.
I have a 7950GX2 but should receive my 8800GTX on Tuesday.
Not entirely pleased myself
 
amromousa said:
anyone get a black screen (no signal to monitor, actually) after installing these? going back to 100.65s fixes the problem. (Vista Ultimate x86, 7900GT)
Click to expand...

I've gotten a black screen twice with these drivers. Back to 100.65 now.
 
b00gjuice said:
I've gotten a black screen twice with these drivers. Back to 100.65 now.
Click to expand...

yea, my system will not get into windows w/ these (have to go into safe mode and uninstall them, then reboot and reinstall the 100.65s..). odd stuff. i gave up on it...8800gtx coming in the mail along w/ a whole new load of parts for a new system..time to sell this sn25p/7900gt
 
I started getting the driver recovery error every five minutes yesterday and installing the 101.41's didn't solve it. A stick of ram was failing and then died. I ran one stick and had no problems. Anyway, I reinstalled because I wanted to try raid 0 with my raptors and so far I haven't had any problems. I was also able to run the Aero assesment tests without a problem.

I have a second machine that I have built for my mom that has two sticks of OCZ pc5400 ram in it. I'm going to throw those in and see if that driver error pops up. Apparently it rears it's ugly head in systems running dual channel ram. If it pops up on this new install running a different set of known to be stable ram I may just send this GTX to the FS forum and get my self an ATI setup. I like the performance I get from my GTX but I wasn't suffering with my 1900XT and I never had a problem with ATI except for the odd optimization issue with the early BETA drivers. I've pretty much have had it with nVidia and this perpetual beta state that these drivers are in. I mean WTF, the WHQLs are even beta for the most part. I'll miss the visual quality a little bit but I'd much rather have the stability.

I'll try some gaming later but I could care less, I really need my desktop to be stable more than anything.
 
InorganicMatter said:
Beta, huh? So now NVIDIA can't even afford to hire some real beta testers, they have to exploit their customers? Wonderful. :rolleyes: I'm ashamed to say that I used NVIDIA products successfully for over ten years.
Click to expand...

I can't believe anyone would say this, the drivers are in beta for the most part they work but theres some bugs to iron out, Nvidia have 2 choices, make the drivers available, and please those who would like to get additional functionality early and also dont mind submitting bugs to help.

It's not as though we have to pay to download the drivers...Just simply restrain yourself from downloading them at all. Tell me, whats the difference between Nvidia NOT releasing beta drivers, and them relasing beta drivers, but you refraining from downloading them?

This whole scandal is sickening.
Click to expand...

What scandle? if it's so easy, get your own company together and produce next gen video cards.

Wind said:
Are people with 7 Series in SLI actually gaining performance in there games they have tried out with these? I'm having no performance increases at all, or barely noticable.

x64 Vista
2x7800GTX 512s
x2 4400

FEAR I gained 5fps to the avg score, 10 on the max with SLI enabled
HL2 Lost Coast Stress Test - Same score as with a single card
Everquest 2 - No performance increase vs a single card, in fact I run two instances on this machine usually, with the 100.65s it was no problem, however with these new beta drivers it is a choppy nightmare even on the lowest settings, basically making it unplayable.
Click to expand...

This is just a guess, but i'd hazard a guess that on Vista that CPU is a bottleneck is most games, hence moving from 1 card to 2 cards might not always give benefits. Remember that Vista is more CPU heavy than XP is.

I'm not getting 2x the frame rate with my setup than with SLI disabled, but it's significantly better, although I have experienced stuttering in 1 games so far, CoD + CoDUO at my LAN this weekend.
 
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