Originally posted by: apoppin
Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
Originally posted by: apoppin
Originally posted by: munky
GeForce 8800 slowdown bug
Wow, I've really been out of the video scene lately, havent even heard of this bug until now. You'd think there would be flamewars raging over this by now... like back in the old days.
i was surprised about it a couple of weeks back
--now it's really old news ... i think
theInq dug further and got a September fix timeline from nvidia
things
have changed
-[the
other forums ARE raging ... guess where the trolls went ?
]
in my comparisons of 2900xt vs 8800GTS OC and benches of both XP and Vista i had no problems with either OS and no real performance differences ... i game all my new games under Vista; Vista has become my day-to-day OS.
Yea think this has been adressed already and the latest drivers include the fix.
What would you recommend to someone looking for a new video card? The 8800GTS 640MB and HD2900XT are about the same price. Which would you buy and why? Which has better drivers at the present time? Keeping in mind, I use Vista x64.
first of all ... it is a big deal and is it is not fixed yet. i brought it up after reading about it and the guys running nvidia cards said it was well-known. Even though i never encountered it in the ten days of testing with my 8800GTS 640M OC. Evidently the 320-MB version gets hit harder.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=41351
AFTER OUR ORIGINAL story, we managed to get an update from an Nvidia rep regarding the actual timeframe of the driver release that will fix the 8800 slowdown issue.
As it stands right now, fix for this highly annoying bug is planned for a release between the end of August and middle of September. My personal assumption would be that the latter date is a more realistic one. Nvidia stated that this problem is "of complex nature," and it seems to us that fixing one card leads to issues with another.
and the original story was here:
http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=41330
Nvidia's Geforce 8800 series of graphics cards suffers random slowdowns, and this can be particularly problematic for owners of the Geforce 8800GTS 320MB, the cheapest 8800 out there.
The problem lies in fact that the G80 GPU has some trouble with texture memory management. In many unrelated cases, this bug starts leaving textures in video memory and system memory, causing the board to run out of texture memory. Once you run out of memory for textures on your graphics card and system, you will experience a lot of swapping with textures on a hard drive, and that is recipe for disaster, at least as far as framerates are concerned.
Some games are more affected than others, it all depends on how the game engine is handling textures. We learned about the situation a while ago, but it has been two weeks and fix is still not out. We heard from Nvidia that testing is well under way, with both Windows XP and Vista - combining these operating systems with different GPUs.
alt-tab was suggester and there is even a better work-around.
i *did* buy a 2900xt ... for several reasons ... i got a great deal - $320 ... and there is the $45 "Valve Orange Box" to consider. Topping that list of my personal reasons is my CrossFire MB - i DO plan to run 2-2900xts because i believe 1 GPU is not enough for todays DX10 games at 16x10.
Now if everything was "equal" .. if i had a single PCIe slot and the prices of both GPUs were the same, - if there were no power supply issues [heat and noise are a non-factor to me ... i didn't notice any extra heat except at the back of the card - being exhausted out of my case and the 2900xt IS quiet except at full-bore which it never is]
i really don't know ...
they are so equal.
if i had time, i'd wait for Cat 7.8 - this month and see if there was any improvment in the 2900xt ... and i'd look at the SW bundle and warranty of the cards i was comparing.
i do not regret my choice one bit. Nor would i have felt bad keeping the 8800GTS 640M OC ... if it wasn't more expensive, etc.
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