how's nvidia's 64-bit support?

[nageov3t]

I'm in the midst of building a new rig and I've decided to go with a 64-bit version of vista for the OS, but I was advised to make sure I actually get a video card with strong 64B support.

so how's nvidia's 64-bit support? I've been thinking about going with either an 8600GT or 8800... haven't quite made up my mind as to whether I'd really need something like an 8800GTS or not.

 

[n7]

Eh...

*bites tongue*

I'd say it's very decent assuming you don't get driver stopped errors or games issues, which some people do, but many don't.

That's about the nicest way i can put it...

 

[nageov3t]

Originally posted by: n7
Eh...

*bites tongue*

I'd say it's very decent assuming you don't get driver stopped errors or games issues, which some people do, but many don't.

That's about the nicest way i can put it...

got any better recommendations if I'm dead set on going with a 64-bit os? I'm not quite married to nvidia or anything, though I haven't heard much better about ati's 64-bit support.

 

[n7]

It does seem that ATi has occasional issues as well, but let's just say i'd consider ATi's Vista drivers far better overall.

And yes, i do recommend Vista 64 (not trying to put down that suggestion).

Just i have been less than satisfied with nV & their drivers with three goddamn cards in a row now: 6800 GT, 7900 GTO, 8800 GTX.

 

[LightningRider]

I have Vista 64 and have used two nvidia cards with it and the drivers are kind of bad. I often get BSODs in games (especially STALKER) and the driver often crashes.

I can't say that Nvidia's drivers are any good, I don't know what they are doing wrong but I wish they'd fix them up. They have improved a lot since the beginning of Vista's release though. When Vista was first released the performance drop was huge! Now it's getting to be less and less. At the current moment I think it's not that noticable anymore. But while performance has improved, the stability and reliability has not improved enough to satisfy me.

But if you can deal with that, I'd still go for it. Nvidia does have the performance advantage with the 8800 GTX and Ultra and the drivers will improve, hopefully not too far in the future.

 

[nullpointerus]

Since you are building a new rig, I thought I'd mention that nVidia's nForce 4 Ultra platform drivers suck under 64-bit Vista. When I enabled the BIOS memory remapping option to allow Windows to see more than about 3 GB RAM, all the SATA drivers (2-3 updates?) available via Windows Update BSOD'd the machine on every boot. When I disabled memory remapping (and with it, anything above about 3 GB RAM), these drivers worked fine. Hopefully, the newer chipsets work OK.

nVidia's Vista driver support really varies depending on your hardware. If you are buying the latest, I'm guessing it will be well-supported.

 

[rise]

i went from vista 32 to vista 64 about a month ago (8800gts, 680i mobo, theater 650 tuner). games i play are med2, oblivion, test drive unltd, CoH, civ4 and some random stuff my son plays. i haven't had any real issues in 64, nothing like when i first tried it in feb. i have occasional crashes on exiting oblivion but i had that sometiimes in xp32.

 

[lavaheadache]

I have no issues with the GTX and Vista home premium. It's been running smoothly for me since day one which was in January. Like N7 said.......... smoe people have no problems and some people only have problems

 

[tuteja1986]

It starts with letter T and ends with E

You can figure out the rest ! "(

See nothing is really wrong with Nvidia 64bit support that is if you play new games and popular games. Its just that performance is not on par with what they should as they would be in 32bit. for new games the FPS performance is considerably lower but the driver are alot stable for new games and popular games but when you start to venture into play old games then you see why drivers aren't so awesome. SLI support sucks on 64bit right now but it should be fixed by the end of year i hope.

 

[nageov3t]

Originally posted by: tuteja1986
It starts with letter T and ends with E

You can figure out the rest ! "(

maybe I'm having a senior moment, but I really can't

if it helps adds to the discussion, I'm looking at a 8600GT if I go with nvidia... I game, but it's mostly limited to mmorpg's and rts games. I haven't played an FPS since quake 2 was new

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: loki8481

Originally posted by: n7
Eh...

*bites tongue*

I'd say it's very decent assuming you don't get driver stopped errors or games issues, which some people do, but many don't.

That's about the nicest way i can put it...

got any better recommendations if I'm dead set on going with a 64-bit os? I'm not quite married to nvidia or anything, though I haven't heard much better about ati's 64-bit support.

well, i just built a new rig and went with Win Vista32 OEM and AMD and nvidia's drivers are a joy ... very few issues ... i expect to upgrade to another MB next year and will reconsider 64-bit at that time

if you are still UNSURE, get Vista 'ultimate' .. you don't have to choose

 

[aka1nas]

It's actually been pretty usable so far with an 8800 under Vista 64 for me. Some games have a few quirks, and performance is probably not quite as fast as XP still, but all in all it's playable.

As for the above user with Nforce4 troubles, do you know if your SATA controller runs in legacy mode? If so, you might want to stick with the modified SATA drivers available at Nforce HQ or use the MS ones if possible.

 

[lousydood]

I have an 8800 with vista-64 home premium and its working out pretty well. However, I have had two unexplained freezes in the past week. It's possible that its a video driver issue.

 

[kreacher]

Originally posted by: LightningRider
I have Vista 64 and have used two nvidia cards with it and the drivers are kind of bad. I often get BSODs in games (especially STALKER) and the driver often crashes.

Wasn't the whole point of shifting the drivers to user mode in Vista at the cost of performance to avoid crashes and BSODs.

 

[Jaskalas]

Sounds like it?ll be some time (year +) before Vista and DX10 are worth leaving XP and DX9 for. Stability is a huge concern, and I?ve personally had enough driver crashes from both NVIDIA and ATI I won?t move to Vista just to increase those annoyances.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Well, nVidia's motherboard AGP utilized chipset lines' 64bit drivers suck... bad

 

[nitromullet]

if you are still UNSURE, get Vista 'ultimate' .. you don't have to choose

That's what I did, I tried Vista 64-bit and 32-bit, and I opted to stick with 32-bit for the time being. There are still almost no 64-bit apps (everything installs in C:\Program Files (x86)), overall the driver support is just not as good, plus a lot of the native 64-bit apps still have problems. I had issues with finding a decent anti-virus application that worked (I bet that viruses run way better on Vista 64-bit than any A/V app I tried. It kinda sucks that even after all these years of having 64-bit cpus available to the general public (at good prices even, thanks to AMD), it's STILL a 32-bit world. I've been trying to go 64-bit for years, but there has always been too many issues to make it a viable option for me (XP Pro x64 was the biggest waste of $200 ever).

On the upside of things, Vista 32-bit is a really nice OS with decent driver/app support. The only reason that I could see for hanging on to XP for a home user not doing anything "mission critical" is either you have a relatively slow PC (with 1GB or less RAM), or you use some special application that has issues with Vista. Having the Media Center build into the OS (Ultimate and Premium) alone is great, and if I had a Windows laptop I would definitely get Ultimate for the bit locker hard drive encryption.

 

[miker75]

I'm running a HD2900XT on Vista Business 64-bit and it's working fine... although I haven't really used many games on it..

GTR2, Half Life2, CS:S (virtually all souce games), Far Cry, uh... that's all I've been playing with recently..

They all work fine with ATI's drivers..

 

[nullpointerus]

Originally posted by: nitromullet

if you are still UNSURE, get Vista 'ultimate' .. you don't have to choose

I had issues with finding a decent anti-virus application that worked (I bet that viruses run way better on Vista 64-bit than any A/V app I tried.

Avast worked fine for me, and it was free. Overclocking utilities are still a big problem though.

 

[miker75]

Originally posted by: nullpointerus

Originally posted by: nitromullet

if you are still UNSURE, get Vista 'ultimate' .. you don't have to choose

I had issues with finding a decent anti-virus application that worked (I bet that viruses run way better on Vista 64-bit than any A/V app I tried.

Avast worked fine for me, and it was free. Overclocking utilities are still a big problem though.

AVG also works on Vista 64-bit fine..and that's free as well..

 

[chizow]

Been running Vista 64 Ultimate for about a month now and its solidified my current rig as the relatively highest performing, most stable, and problem-free rig I've ever built. I didn't have any real competitive options when I built my rig in January, but other than my original mobo I've had no regrets about any of the components I picked.

Nvidia had some general problems and game compatibility issues early on but the drivers have been very good with regular updates and improvements since March. I think my machine has locked up or rebooted on its own 2x since I installed Vista (yes, uptimes of weeks at a time, amazing) and one of them was for an update. I had similar experiences with XP as well, as I was able to complete entire runs in Titan Quest in the same instance of the game by simply alt-tabbing out whenever I wasn't playing.

There were some serious problems with LOTRO and Vista, with many of the problems N7 describes, but it was clearly an LOTRO client problem and not a Vista/Nvidia problem. The last update fixed the Vista CTD and driver restarting problems entirely. Vista also seems more picky in terms of RAM timings and read/write fault tolerance, as some early problems I was experiencing in Vista once again pointed to faulty RAM (and most likely, a faulty motherboard). Swapped out the motherboard and RMA'd the RAM and its been smooth sailing since.

One main complaint about Vista is that is slower than XP, with only 2GB at least. Alt-tabbing between games and apps, particularly in games with large textures takes way too long. HDD thrashes a lot and performance is generally slow. My other 2 GB of RAM gets back in from RMA today so hopefully that clears up the sluggishness.

Overall I'm very pleased with performance in Vista, although I haven't bothered to re-install some games. I've installed and played enough of them without problems though, so I'm leaning towards game-specific problems rather than any endemic issues with NV/Vista drivers. Creative drivers are a different story though, so I guess that'd be my other main complaint.

 

[nitromullet]

I tried Avast, and I had RPC errors. Gave Symantec a try as well, and it kept saying that I was out of disk space when I have a few 100GBs to spare. I didn't try AVG though. I'm sure that there are lots of people who are happy with Vista x64, but for me the experience overall was not worth the effort considering that the vast majority of applications are still 32-bit. I have the Vista Ultimate DVD though, so I'll be able to install x64 should I want to give it another try.