New Nvidia Graphic Card Driver is out now

[Davir]

Nvidia Graphic Card Driver is out now http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Version 169.25 :)

[Ed.]

Nvidia Graphic Card Driver is out now http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Version 169.25 :)
Does it fix anything to do with Socities?

[JuliaSet]

I think its best to let Phil Walker bang on it for an evaluation. It is not fun to change drivers and not get to play your holiday gifts.

He told me that nvidia drivers 163 and 171 are no good for our games. It takes him a few weeks to stress out a new driver. He usually posts his Nvidia graphics card stuff in the Caesar4 tech help forum

Julia

[Khanon]

I think its best to let Phil Walker bang on it for an evaluation. It is not fun to change drivers and not get to play your holiday gifts.

He told me that nvidia drivers 163 and 171 are no good for our games. It takes him a few weeks to stress out a new driver. He usually posts his Nvidia graphics card stuff in the Caesar4 tech help forum

Julia

Interesting... I'm using 163.75 and having no problems at all, other than the game slowing down to a crawl with high populations...and that's just a problem with having only a 2800+ processor and only using a 7800GS AGP card (low texture fill and shading rates compared to most newer cards).

[JuliaSet]

Last night he mentioned how some of the drivers worked ok with Media Center XP.

There are too many variables!!!! EEEEK!

[JuliaSet]

The 163.75s come in both XP and Vista versions though, so you have to get the right drivers to "match" the operating system as well. Main thread to watch (by hopefully the 28th) is Phil's nVidia thread as it will be updated noting if the new drivers are decent. Look here; http://www.tiltedmill.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10135 (http://www.tiltedmill.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10135)

[Khanon]

Actually, I'm running:

XP OEM Home Edition (32-bit)
7800 GS AGP
163.75 NVidia drivers
On-Board RealTek sound...latest drivers.
AMD 64 2800+
2gb DDR2 SDRAM

I was running a Creative Audigy SE card for sound, but that appeared to have issues with many games, new and old. The card is about to hit EOL, and as such Creative hasn't maintained drivers for it in over a year. Many of my FPS issues with many games, both offline and online, were resolved by getting rid of the Audigy and just using onboard sound, which still gets driver updates constantly.

I had read the notes about not trusting 163.75 drivers, but I was in a quandary. I play many newer games as well, and many of them have problems with the "ancient" drivers being promoted for use with TM games. Problems ranged from graphical glitches to hitching to downright not being able to play them at all.

Since picking up the 163.75 drivers, I've had no crashes with any TM products I own, nor any other games, for that matter. Once I can upgrade the CPU, my lag on "full screens" such as high population towns in SC products (ALL of them), Children of the Nile, World of Warcraft, etc. should go away. 1.8ghz is a big bottleneck when your GPU sports 38.4ghz of memory bandwidth.

At any rate, part of my point is that many times, and I've said this time and again, game glitching can mask real problems. Often, people automatically assume that it's the video card or driver without giving the sound card and/or its drivers a second thought. I've found, many times, that it's sound driver incompatibilities, or soundcard incompatibilities, that cause problems such as seen about the forums.

Not to knock testing of anything... It's just that it's not always the video card or driver's problem. hitching, lockups, freezes, and crashes can all be caused by sound card/driver problems, and almost always SEEM to be video related...

The only other point I was making is that just because a certain video driver gives one person a problem is no guarantee that it's a bad driver...just possibly a driver that has compatibility issues with other things on the test system(s).

Edit: In fact, I'm going to go grab the latest Nvidia and RealTek drivers now, since both have newer ones out.

[Kuplo]

Im using this driver already and all of my games that Ive played since installing the driver have worked fine with no problems. SCS actually allowed me to play for over 2 hours last night, though towards the end it started to feel rather laggy, so I felt it was time to shut down before the game crashed on me, but 2 hours is far more than I've been able to play prior to the game update and driver update.

[Khanon]

So far, so good. In fact, interestingly enough, over the past 1 1/2 hours, the game not only hasn't crashed, but it is also running much smoother. I had small hitches whenever I would pan around or get "horizon shots" with the older drivers. Not now... Now to build a big city and see if it handles large pops better, too. In fact, My alt+Tabbing is much quicker and more stable, as well.

169.21 drivers and sound drivers only 2 months old, direct from RealTek.

[Khanon]

Update #2:

I started a new city 6 hours ago...played for 6 hours straight. city is almost at 30k pop and though my system is bogging down, it's not as bogged down as it was before. No graphical hitches at all with the new drivers, except the stuttering movement I expected with a city this size.

My personal thumb's up for the new Nvidia driver.

And now a couple shots of Saberton...

[PsYChoWaTrMelon]

personally i get better performance with custom nvidia releases than with the onese listed in the Ceasar section. Those recommendations didn't
work most of the time for me.


169.21 is windows xp and media center edition and win xp x64
169.25 is Vista 32bit and 64 bit

i would highly recommend for the nvidia geforce 8 series you use these.