Advice on 8800GT SLI Oblivion Drivers XP 32-bit?

[Hajpoj]

E2140 @ 2.7ghz
2GB Ram
8800GT in SLI(running 169.02 atm)
Corsair TX-650


I know I've got plenty of power, but I just can seem to get oblivion to run properly on SLI for the life of me. Tried a lot of 17x series drivers all failing to load oblivion, a few of the 169.xx as well. Oblivion only seems to work with 169.xx series drivers, but experiences crashing outdoors with SLI enabled. 169 only seems to give me partial SLI functionality as more Vram is being utilized but frame-rates show no improvement over disabling/enabling SLI.

Played with profiles as well in all the drivers, Single GPU, AFR, AFR2, SLI Rec, etc.

My other games are worked fine under SLI with many of the drivers I tried, BF2142 is just a joy with 8xQ AA + 16xAS @ 1680x1050.

Oblivion seems to just be a picky SOB, 169.04, 169.21 & 169.28 did not cause crashes. All they did was utilize more Vram instead of improving fps while 169.02 does what it's supposed to do, except it likes to hardlock my system while outdoors.

 

[Hajpoj]

bump

 

[kmmatney]

Does it run OK if you turn off AA, or does it refuse to work in SLI no matter what your settings?

 

[jbh545]

I don't think it's going to work bro. I have a similar problem with my 8800GTS SLI setup and I've spent probably 2-3 whole days cumulatively trying to fix it with no results. I dual boot and it seems broken in both XP and vista. I've tried basically every 169.xx through 17x driver over the past few months as they've been released and it's no help at all. I've also tried nhancer, which some people say helps but I haven't gotten any benefit from it.

Basically all of the drivers either 1) give a very slight boost with SLI (that might even just be placebo), but then when I go into a crowded area like IC marketplace the game slows to a crawl and then doesn't speed back up like it should when I transition areas (so, getting like 20FPS inside of shops), OR 2) the drivers crash relatively quickly in the overworld, and it's usually duplicateable by walking the same path

I've done countless searches to try to find a solution and to no avail. Tried messing with pretty much every graphics option and none of them had any effect. My best guess is that the texture mods I use (basically all of the most intense ones) are too much for the VRAM of an SLI setup. In the worst areas, I've seen my texture memory useage go over 800MB. So one card works properly, giving the stutters you'd expect when VRAM is overloaded but still giving "normal" framerates that are appropriate for the graphical intensity. But with two cards, maybe the excess texture memory useage isn't being handled correctly.