NV "official" 29.42's make a BIG diff on my TI4600

[Guest]

FS2002 performance for me. Could be placebo. You make your opinion.Anyone else?btP4 2.2 NorthwoodVisionTek TI4600 GeForce 4ASUS P4T-E1 gig PC800 RIMMSTwin 60's Western DigitalLots of other stuff...that you don't care about. :)

[John_Tavendale 453]

BT,I'll let you know as soon as my dead card is replaced. I have been reading that others have found their gaming is a little better under these new drivers, I'm interested to see myself.

[Guest]

OK...I'm sure now. On my system, the 29.42 drivers are required. Let me explain.Before XP, (WinME) I had what I considered excellent performance for my system (ASUS P4T, 1.7 Willamette, 512MB RAM, VisionTek TI4600). Wishing to build my children a new PC for their home school, I moved my old components to their chassis, and built the current box I'm running now:ASUS P4T-E2.2 Northwood1.0GB RAMVisionTek TI4600My dream was to make the "ultimate" chassis for MSFS2002, but if you remember, when I first built it, I was having problem after problem.BIG LESSON HERE: IF IT BOOTS, AND RUNS FOR MORE THAN A MINUTE OR TWO, ITS PROBABLY THE DRIVERSYep...first it was the "intel.inf" file. Once I came upon that little epiphany, I was left with a stable box, but one that in FS2002, was not what I expected. (Other games seemed fine, probably OpenGL.) Things were still pretty good, but not like I remembered with my old system. The biggest issue for me was I was seeing paging of the surface textures, they were not clear, and it seemed they were not using all the frame buffer of my card (for lack of a better description, the distance looked "different"). I was privately disappointed. In my heart, I was blaming XP, but I knew better. (see, I had to upgrade to XP to get the Northwood running properly. 9X, for me, just could not hack the stresses of the latest and greatest from Intel) Yet in a way, it was XP in the fact the 28.32 driver from Nvidia was having severe issues for me. Now with the 29.42 and XP, NT's performance is finally making this whole adventure worthwhile, and in a big way! My 2002 settings are this:All Max except...Terrain Mesh 90%ATC 90%Detailed textures offReflective water off1600 X 1024 32bitNo AA, who needs it at this resolution!Performance is phenomenal. 30s and 40s in the most detailed of areas. Fluid, crisp, intensely real. There is no doubt...MS OWNS the Flight Simulation market now.So...Take this as gospel. If you have a Nvidia type card, G2 and up I suspect will be the only ones to benefit, run XP, and want to see FS2002 as the software engineers envisioned it? Run, don't walk to:www.nvidia.comget the 29.42's and install them as recommended on the Nvidia site. You won't be sorry.Cheers,bt

[Guest SD Sim]

Hey Braun,Glad to hear that you have MSFS running better. By paging, I assume you're refering to what I see as textures that are slow to pop into focus. This has always been, and continues to be, a big problem on my Athlon/Ti4600 system. I have 29.42 drivers, which I d/l'd from 3DGuru. These are digitally signed, so should be the same as those on the nVidia site. I may have to try the nVidia version, but I suspect the problem lies elsewhere. I do think this issue can be resolved, if I can ever figure out the source of the problem. I wonder if it has anything to do with how the new drivers are installed, and what gets removed/overwritten :-hmmm

[Guest]

Hey David. Thanks for your comments, sorry that you have experienced the same frustrations that I did. I agree with your premise that it is driver related, but which drivers would be the twenty dollar question.What chipset drives your Athlon MB? Latest and greatest drivers, right? As to your video drivers downloaded from 3DGuru, I'm sure they are just fine. Probably just mirrored Nvidia drivers, especially since you say they reported a digital sig.Why don't you just list some specs, ala' "minimum requirements", and the community will put it's collective head with yours. Surely then an answer can be found. There is power in numbers! :)Best,bt

[Guest SD Sim]

Hi Braun,In an effort to save space, I have placed my system specs in my profile comments. That used to be much clearer before I added my signature banner. I'll fix this after posting this. As for the Via 4 in 1 drivers, I installed the drivers that came with the ASUS MB (built the system about 2 months ago). I'm ashamed to admit that, despite my best efforts, I've not been able to figure out where in the device manager I can find the version number :-roll. But now that you've revealed my dirty little secret, I'm sure someone will show me the error of my ways :-lol. Before I forget, the one reason I haven't toyed with the drivers is that the computer really runs quite well (3D Mark2001SE score of 9400), and with all the nightmare posts on Via chips I've seen in this forum and others, I'm very reluctant to change the existing drivers. You know, if it's not broken, don't....

[Guest]

David: I could not find out how to determine ver number for Via, but I did come across some things in my travels. Hope this helps you find a solution. http://www.viahardware.com/download/index.shtm#4in1Read the notes and installation guidehttp://groups.google.com/groups?q=ASUS+A7V...wcrnsc53&rnum=3Read the comments concerning your mobo.http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&....net%26rnum%3D7Look for the comment concerning the WHQL-certified AGP driver 4.10b

[John_Tavendale 453]

Well I finally got my GF4 back, and install the 29.42 drivers. They seem to perform quite nicely.

[Guest]

Congrats! So...what made your card go bad? Any idea? What were the symptoms?Best,bt

[John_Tavendale 453]

No idea :-lol I took it out to install a new CPU, stuck it all back together and it wouldn't post.. discovered it was my graphics card.Might have been the good old static electricity, I don't really know.

[Guest SD Sim]

Hi Braun,Thank you for your ideas. I spent some time as well on the Via website, and in particular the forum section, and have made some headway. The biggest hurdle, of course, is having to sort through those long threads that contain, oh, 75 or more posts ;). I do think there are some issues that I need to sort through with my system, however I need to do some more homework before sharing my pain here.