Which nVidia drivers to use????

[Ike0069]

Everything was fine until I went with the drivers that came witht he BF2 demo.
Then I started getting hanging/stuttering in EVERy game I played, not just BF2.
I then tried 77.72, and yesterday 77.77. These did not help at all. In fact, 77.77 drivers seem to make is worse.

I used driver cleaner and rolled back my drivers to 66.93.

Now I no longer get the problems in the other games I play, but BF2 looks like crap. I do realize that you need are supposed to use newer drivers than 66.93 for BF2, but there is a definite problem with them, so I am hesitant to upgrade now.

So which drivers is everyone using for BF2 that also uses a 6800 series card? Any issues with your current nVidia drivers?

 

[SergeC]

I use the 77.77 with my 6800GT in BF2. No issues at all.

 

[Cheezeit]

aw man, ive been hearing issues with the drivers that came with bf2 everywhere. why did you install them?

anyways, im running 77.77 on my evga 6800nu no issues at all.

try totally uninstalling your drivers. if that dosent work, reinstall windows.

 

[theMan]

try upgrading step by step to each final release driver. 71.84, 71.89, 77.72, 77.77. see when they start giving you problems. maybe your video bios got corrupted???

 

[Ike0069]

I know exactly when they started giving me problems. As soon as I used teh drivers that came with BF2. (not sure which they were).
I guess I'll try a clean install of 77.77 and see if that works. I didn't use driver cleaner after I used the BF2 drivers until tonight. Maybe that was my problem?

 

[Xephian]

The latest official drivers seem good.

 

[Gamingphreek]

77.77 are the preferred drivers. The .76's are not bad but the Overlay bug is present (easy to fix). Also look at the XG drivers.

I have all this (including recommended drivers) in the driver thread; please search before posting this sort of thing, because odds are, it has been answered.

-Kevin

 

[Ike0069]

Well, I appreciate the reply Kevin, but if you read the OP, you'll notice I've tried the latest drivers. In fact I got the link from your thread. (BTW, it lost it's ssticky!)

Now I don't give 2 sh!ts about what the "recommended" drivers are. I want something that actually works specifically with BF2 and a 6800 series card.

That was the reason for this thread. And yes, I did try about a half dozen different searches and did not find anything specific about BF2, 6800 cards, and new drivers. I did see several comments about SLI and 7800 series cards though.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: Ike0069
Well, I appreciate the reply Kevin, but if you read the OP, you'll notice I've tried the latest drivers. In fact I got the link from your thread. (BTW, it lost it's ssticky!)

Now I don't give 2 sh!ts about what the "recommended" drivers are. I want something that actually works specifically with BF2 and a 6800 series card.

That was the reason for this thread. And yes, I did try about a half dozen different searches and did not find anything specific about BF2, 6800 cards, and new drivers. I did see several comments about SLI and 7800 series cards though.

If you think i am going to give any more of my recommendations after that you can forget it...

-Kevin

 

[Tyrant222]

try 80.40

 

[kman79]

I'm not really sure how you do your driver installs but this is the way I've been doing mine and I have had no problems what so ever.

Go to control panel, add/remove program uninstal Nvidia Display driver.

Reboot into safe mode.

If windows detects video card, cancel out.

Run Driver Cleaner Pro

Reboot

Install new drivers.

Doing it this way has always worked for me fine. I don't own a 6800 GT, but from reading other threads XTreme-G 77.62 HD Type 3 drivers work best for 6800 GT. Good luck

 

[CraigRT]

I am using the 77.72 drivers with my eVGA 6800GT and no issues at all, in any game at all.

 

[Cypher101]

im useing 77.77 drivers with 2x Asus Geforce 6800 Ultras in SLI mode and no probs here

what kind of probs are u haveing Ike0069 ?? your card mite be bad ot going bad or some other conflict with your system

BTW what happend to the driver sticky Gamingphreek??

 

[Spacecomber]

I didn't have any trouble with either the 77.30 drivers that came with the game or the subsequent 77.72 WHQL drivers. This is to say other than the known issues, BF2 will stutter unless you have more than a GB of RAM and want to run the game with textures set to high, and the 77.72 drivers have a bug when it comes to the default setting for the video overlay gamma. I'm currently still running the 77.72 drivers and I play BF2 quite a bit.

Running a 6800GT on a socket A MB with a CPU at 2.3GHz and 1.5GB of RAM.

Point is that I'm not too sure that the problems you describe are due to the drivers, themselves.

Space

 

[Ike0069]

Well last night I was playing some games (GTA SA, Far Cry,MVP 05) with the 66.93 drivers an and everything was perfect.

I then upgraded to 77.77 drivers again, and immediately I get the same problem. The video will freeze for about 2-3 seconds and also the sound freezes also during this time.
Kind of hard to explain, but the sound gets very loud during this "freezing" of the VC. Normally if I notice video lag from my FPS dropping to low, ther is no sound issue. This is definitely something different.

After thinking about it, maybe it's a conflict with the new nVidia drivers my sound card drivers.
I have a the Chaintech 5.1 SC, using the c-media drivers from the website.

I'll see if there is an updated c-media driver that might help.

 

[bklyn1028]

I have a gigabyte 6900GT....have been havin probs too....with every game..video lags...sketchy....even d/l FEAR demo this morn...same thing after about 5 min...it starts lagging...was thinking maybe SLI would help

 

[bklyn1028]

make that a 6800.....

 

[Ike0069]

Assuming you have 1 GB of RAM (if not you should first get at lest this much), a 3500+/6800 GT is plenty good enough to run any game (except for BF2) on medium to high settings with no lag.
IMO, it's the crappy coding of BF2 that is causing most of the problems.

 

[Gamingphreek]

IMO, it's the crappy coding of BF2 that is causing most of the problems.

No. Games are getting more demanding. You didn't expect us to stay at 1gig forever did you?

-Kevin

 

[bklyn1028]

are you saying 1gig isn't enough???......would getting another 6800GT and going SLI stop the lagging? I know there are mixed views on this....

 

[Gamingphreek]

No. You aren't getting consistently low framerates. It seems that the disk will occasionally, have to use the swap file because it is out of memory. I would definitely upgrade to 2gig if you plan on playing BF2 for any length of time.

-Kevin

 

[orangat]

I just upgraded to 77.77 from 71.89 and BF2 seems to run just fine. Didn't notice any stuttering with 1gb memory. The release notes say it fixes a performance issue related to memory allocation.

If it doesn't work, I'd advise downgrading to 71.89 which is stable or 77.30 which I heard is pretty ok too.

 

[Cypher101]

1 gig of ram is fine but if u play HL2,D3,FarCryor BF2 id say get 2 it sounds like over kill but with games becomeing more demanding its good to have a some xtra ram + to keep all the other comp stuff running fine

and yes BF2 no matter what will jump and skip a bit im hopeing the 1.3 patch with fix this.i play mine at 1024x768 all cranked up high and even with my system it will still jerk or slow down a bit

 

[Rage1881]

this is an odd issue ive searched and read alot about it.. some people get it bad like ike the sound and fps get messed... others only get quick studder.. like a hicup every now and then.. others get the hicops every 5 seconds.. its odd indeed.. and seems only present in the 6800 line.. mainly the 6800nu and gt.. some say its a conflict with nforce 3 and 4.. but i get the same thing im using nf2 still.. others say its fast writes...side band addressing.. the list goes on and on.. i only get the problem in guild wars and warcraft 3 everything else is fine.. ive tried all drivers accept pre 7 series im not willing to go that far back. Im using the 77.77 right now and they work great with everything accpet wc 3 and guild wars of coarse.. ... i think im just gonna get an x800xl and be done with it.

 

[Ike0069]

Originally posted by: Rage1881
this is an odd issue ive searched and read alot about it.. some people get it bad like ike the sound and fps get messed... others only get quick studder.. like a hicup every now and then.. others get the hicops every 5 seconds.. its odd indeed.. and seems only present in the 6800 line.. mainly the 6800nu and gt.. some say its a conflict with nforce 3 and 4.. but i get the same thing im using nf2 still.. others say its fast writes...side band addressing.. the list goes on and on.. i only get the problem in guild wars and warcraft 3 everything else is fine.. ive tried all drivers accept pre 7 series im not willing to go that far back. Im using the 77.77 right now and they work great with everything accpet wc 3 and guild wars of coarse.. ... i think im just gonna get an x800xl and be done with it.

Thanks for that post. I'm also thinking that it's related to my particular video card. It's not the small pauses/jumps in BF2 that I'm concerned with. It's the longer pauses with sound issues that has only started happening in all my games with these new drivers.

I'm now testing the new XG drivers (77.77) and initial results look like they may help. I played BF2 last night for about 1.5 hours and only had one sound/video freeze in that time. I use to get them randomly, but probably an average on one every 10-15 minutes.