NVIDIA drivers for Vista suck (updated to include Win 7 and Server 2008 r2)

[Rage_3K_Moiz]

If the game was working fine, it's probably a conflict between the Vista interface and the drivers. BTW, how're the ATi drivers? Anyone had corruption on Vista? For the one week I used Vista on my PC, I had no corruption, but I did have a lot of BSODs.

 

[Barnezz]

All the rush to have Vista is so sickening. Now all the GPU companies are trying to develop drivers for Vista instead of developing good drivers for XP. Wait until SP1 for Vista is my moto . check out ---www.lost.eu/42bbb---

 

[tifc8lraz]

Stupid thing.........I tried the fix, and it doesn't work . What happens is that when installing new drivers, it will either go black on install and not come back or it will work but will be black on reboot !

 

[raybay]

Just about has to be a defective card.

 

[tifc8lraz]

Nope....fine in Xp :unch: !

 

[tifc8lraz]

Just installed with a later date Windows Vista, and I still get the same problem.....stuck in 1024x768 .

 

[raybay]

We never thought it was Windows VISTA. It is either the video card, the video card drivers, or memory.

 

[tifc8lraz]

It's the driver.....but I've tried a few of them, and I still get the same problem. I know some earlier versions of Vista had a resolution problem.

 

[raybay]

NVidia has gone to a great deal of work to repair and replace all the drivers.
First, remove the drives in the Device manager and give VISTA the opportunity to replace them when you reboot via a cold boot.
If not, remove and reseat the video card.
Then try the downloaded drivers once more.

 

[SNGX1275]

We never thought it was Windows VISTA. It is either the video card, the video card drivers, or memory.

It was and always was the drivers for me, just as the title of the thread says. Its not the card because with the default Vista drivers all is well, its not the memory because of the same reason. Also because of flawless performance in another OS.

I am confident that this is an issue much like the infinite loop issue with nvidia cards and XP when it first came out, and I don't think this will be fixed by nvidia, but I think the drivers are fully responsible for what I see based on every driver other than the default ones causing the corruption. But the problem is in the way Vista and the drivers work together. It is my belief that this will 'magically' get fixed in Vista SP1 with no formal acknowledgement that this is/was a problem.

 

[raybay]

We just do not see those problems with VISTA in our installs or repairs involving nVidia devices. It must be quite rare... Sometimes there are issues with a few other video cards... and we have seen a cases where nVidia upgraded its drivers online.

 

[mv670]

what if you have a driver that won't uninstall when you try to remove it from the programs list?

 

[Rick]

nVidia is universally rated by users (including this forum) as the best for video cards and for drivers. We see no special problems between VISTA and nVidia...

nVidia drivers responsible for nearly 30% of all crashes in Windows Vista (2007).
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-drivers-responsible-for-nearly-30-of-vista-crashes-in-20/

Things are better now, I'm sure, but don't conclude a single company makes the 'best' drivers, hands down...

 

[SNGX1275]

Unfortunately for this thread, I no longer run Vista on that hardware. I have moved that VIsta license to this machine now with better hardware... Sadly, SP1 has now came out and I don't have any easy way to test my theory that it would get fixed in SP1.

I saw a very similar thing (as I noted above, post 35) happen with XP. It wasn't corruption, but it was an issue that wasn't formally recognised and then got magically fixed in SP1. I ran Whistler betas for months, never had an infinite loop issue, ran XP retail and fought them continously until SP1. I'm not sure that SP1 for Vista would fix it, but we took over 30 posts here with me giving some pretty detailed information on what caused it and what I was doing to fix it and we didn't come up with an answer. I did note that going back to the "stock" drivers fixed the issue, so that completely rules out hardware or temp issues. It IS a software issue, I don't think you can argue otherwise if you read the thread.

 

[SNGX1275]

Unfortunately for this thread, I no longer run Vista on that hardware. I have moved that VIsta license to this machine now with better hardware... Sadly, SP1 has now came out and I don't have any easy way to test my theory that it would get fixed in SP1....

I know this is an old thread, and I know we have a ton of new members since then, but I wanted to give an update to this since now I can.

Turns out, I don't think Windows Vista SP1 would have fixed it, the reason I say that is because on the same machine I have tried the beta of Windows 7. Here are the results:

Now this is pretty preliminary. Unlike in Vista, once I logged in things seem to be displaying properly, although I've only been running 7 for a few minutes. Perhaps it will corrupt soon. If it doesn't, then maybe they did fix it, and just haven't fixed it during their install portion.

 

[adweston]

Hmmm. I have no problems at all with Vista and nVIDIA drivers. The only time I ever got "glitching" was because the card itself was pooched. I'll bet your card is defective as well.

 

[SNGX1275]

Card isn't defective, I covered all of that in earlier posts, works fine in XP and XP64.

 

[SNGX1275]

Well, just as an update. The same problem exists in Windows Server 2008 r2. Works with generic drivers just fine, once nvidia's are installed it corrupts badly. I had to enable Aero to fix it (if you see above, it only happened when UAC was there, dumping back to 'classic' theme). Enabling Aero was a chore because I couldn't read anything on screen, I had to try all the steps here on Windows 7 and try to do it by keyboard, then do the same keystrokes over on Server 2008 to get it enabled. Finally got it though and all is well.

So I might backpedal a bit on calling it directly a driver issue, it could be that I need to tweak something in the bios about AGP... perhaps something with write caching or aperture size...

 

[Leeky]

@SNGX
Given your huge problems, would it not be better to just keep the generic drivers? Reading this thread, I don't get the impression you need it for performance intensive GPU use.

Your definitely dedicated. After approx 3 years I'd certainly have given up on it and either used generic drivers, or replaced the card! Respect is due for your patience!

 

[SNGX1275]

Well, it would be nice to use it as a secondary gaming PC for slightly older games. The problem, at least with Server 2008, is the generic drivers won't let me use 1280x1024. Also there was a long delay between the last one and this update was because I let a fellow Techspotter borrow the board until he could scrape together enough money for a new system after his main one had a motherboard die. He just used a PCIe graphics card on it and didn't have any issues.

It was more of a problem in Vista because of UAC. UAC dumps it to classic mode (at least partially) or if you ran a program that wasn't compatible with Aero it would dump the whole system to Classic. Classic is the only place that has the corruption. Now with Server 2008 and Aero enabled the only time I ever see the corruption is at the login screen, once logged in and it jumps to Aero all is well.