Dropped back to 182 drivers

[Steven Palmer]

Yes, Simbin titles only, but TBH I haven't been doing much gaming in anything else lately.
Most of the problems have been GTRE (chronic freezing, not stuttering) but have also had a couple of freezes with GTL also.
Basically the PC freezes for anywhere from 15 secs to 3 minutes, then usually comes alive but with scrambled graphics. Sometimes, it stays frozen and must be rebooted again to recover. They are totally random, off-line as well as on-line, and usually after recovering from the freeze, I can run the session continuously for hours afterwards and never get another freeze.

My old clunker of a PC was faultless, the new whizz bang PC has been a nightmare.

Been having these issue with both of these 2 titles as well over the last couple of weeks, went from 182, to 185 and the new 186 (froze in friday night mini race, but did recover with the graphical glitches warren mentioned, albeit it put me out of the race)

All other games and applications are dandy, so I'll live with the frustration of it until I find a driver that I'm happy with. (probably easier said than done)

 

[Eric Nelson]

I have issues with graphics as well. Single digit frame rates as field size increases.

Running a Nvidia GEFORCE 8400 GS.

Driver set 178.24
Stream processors 8
Memory interface 64 bit
Memory 512 mb

Is this just a slow card?

All other functions of RAM etc. appear to be not at max capacity.

 

[Lee Downham]

Simple answer is yes I'm afraid Eric ... from memory the 8xxx series cards went something along the lines of:
8400 budget
8600 mid range / business
8800 gaming

You should still be able to run Evo with 30+ fps, but at a guess you will have to turn all the graphics options down to pretty much a bare minimum in game, and turn off all the other "prettyfying" options in the Nvidia driver settings.

... I might have 2 x 8800GT's for sale soon if I can't sort this :wink2:

Edit: just tested the 186.18's and still had stuttering :sad:

 

[Eric Nelson]

yeah I have stuffed the settings down to nothing and I still get issues if too many cars on track at once.

I see I can get a 1g 9400 in PCI socket config for a good price. wonder if this will help. my machine takes PCI not PCI-X whihc is a bummer for now.

thoughts for anyone on thsi card will be helpful as I am not a HARDWARE guru when it comes to puters.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4369747&CatId=1603

TIA Eric

 

[Lee Downham]

Maybe best to post a thread in the hardware section with your existing PC specs and I know there at least a couple of guys over there who will help :wink2:

Going from an 8400 to a 9400 is not going to do that much for you though I don't think.
Going to an 8600 or 9600 would do you more favours, and a 8800GT or 9800GT or GTX would be better and not much extra cost I don't think.

Anyways ... post that thread and see what the hardware boys come back with.

 

[Lee Downham]

Update on driver issues ... 186.18 WHQL has just got me through a couple of races without a driver crash or anything (and its over 32ºC in here tonight, so my OEM cooling fans and stuff are working ... just )

The stuttering is still there though and annoying as hell, but I am learning to drive around it for the time being.

Another thing I tried was shifting out all the replays I had in my replaydata folders, plus switching off the replays and the logging - this obviously has done nothing for me as I still have the stuttering :sad:

 

[Patrick van Driel]

Maybe i am out of sinc here,but i had those problems myself and found it was the voltage on my MB for the OZC memory. It needs 2.1V and default MOBO setting is 1.8V. I changed that and had no more lockup's. Just thinking out loud here. I have 4GB OZC platinium and 2 times Geforce GTX 260 cards with the 185 drivers on a Gigabyte P35DQ6 MOBO

 

[Lee Downham]

Nice up Patrick, thanks for the idea bud ... although I don't think its my issue here - I am at 2.14V on an Asus Striker Extreme mobo running 4GB Gskill DDR2-1066. I am not getting system lockups nor driver crashes any more (at least not with these latest drivers) its just stuttering.
BTW: nice sounding rig you got yourself there, especially the 2 x 260GTX :drool:

 

[Patrick van Driel]

Nice up Patrick, thanks for the idea bud ... although I don't think its my issue here - I am at 2.14V on an Asus Striker Extreme mobo running 4GB Gskill DDR2-1066. I am not getting system lockups nor driver crashes any more (at least not with these latest drivers) its just stuttering.
BTW: nice sounding rig you got yourself there, especially the 2 x 260GTX :drool:

Thx , running pretty smooth indeed .

 

[Sam J Simpson]

I'm just about ready to give up on simming, nothing I do now will stop these freezes, GTL, EVO, rFactor, GTR2 are all doing it, it has only started happening on my rig since I installed a couple of demos, SSV8 and Overlord2, that have updated DX which makes me think that MS and NV have not been discussing what they are going to do, which again I should not be surprised at, Only solution I can think of now is a reformat and OS install which makes me so angry as the OS has only been in a few months, why did I spend a rediculous amount of money to "upgrade" to another OS, GPU etc. that makes my box unuseable?

Sam

PS. Vista 64bit, BFG GTX 285 OCX, Samsung SM 2433, 6gig OCZ Platinum were the upgrades

 

[Lee Downham]

Sad times indeed Sam J ... I am totally frustrated by this, and no matter what I do it does not seem to be any closer to being fixed :sad:

I even bashed a new BIOS version in on my motherboard yesterday which I have been avoiding like the plague since the last one I did cost me 3 days of downtime and I had to revert back to the one I was previously on cos of massive instability with the newer one.

-- BIOS update has not done anything to help - now on Asus Striker Extreme Bios rev 1901 --