At least on my system, specs below, these drivers do not pump up the fan when flying FSX. That is the only 3D program I run and during my initial flight today, after about an hour, I got a speckled screen and severe tearing of the video which I recognized as overheating memory or GPU and shut down immediately. I wear headphones so when I took them off and listened, the fan was still at idle or slightly above. I then downloaded and fired up Riva Tuner and took the fan up to 70% manually and restarted FSX. Sure enough, the speckles are gone and I completed the flight with no further issues.

I actually just came here to post about this exact topic.I have a GTX285, and also the 197.xx drivers. I've been having texture flashing problems. They'd seem to go from occasional, to horrible. I'd tried everything I could think of over the last 3 days, but nothing gave me relief. I'd have moments of 30 minutes where I thought i'd at least minimized the problem to where the sim was playable, but then it'd come back with a vengeance. Last night, I tried going to older drivers, it didn't help. In reverting back to 197, I also grabbed ntune and thought I'd try underclocking my card (it came factory oc'ed to 666/1512). That didn't help either. But then I noticed the fan speed was on 14% (!). I moved it up to 45%, and haven't had a *single* texture flash since (90 mins of flying, incl PNW and non-PNW areas). Now I don't know if it was from reinstalling the drivers, or from the fan bump, but my money's on the fan. I just hope it sticks. Every time I think I have this thing beat, it seems to come back and bite me in the arse.

Hi I'm very interested in reading this post as only yesterday my brother in law took my 8800 ultre away to test on his rig as all of a sudden i am getting exactly what the others are having. At first my screen would appear ok but within minutes of being on i get specles starting to appear and then the screen will just become distorted, looking at my card the fan would appear to be running ok but not sure how fast. Hopefully my brothet in law can confirm tonight the card is ok on his rig and if so i will have to go back to a safer set of drivers. Cheers Shaun

Ok, so it appears the folks at nVidia think the fan issue reported on the 196.xx drivers is solved in the 197.13 but I can vouch that it is not. I will post a message on their forum sometime today and see what they say. All things considered, I guess I don't mind running Riva Tuner before I fly until the issue is resolved, as I am very happy with the results of the drivers with FSX so far. But this system is brand new and I am not through experimenting with various FSX tweaks and settings. I promised myself once I get a new fast machine I would not go into the tweaking business, but here I go...I am so glad that others have verified that I'm not losing my mind. Just so you know, AFAIK, the speckles are artifacts of data loss from either the GPU itself OR the video card's memory, usually due to overstress or overheating. Maybe an overclocker can verify what I am saying here. This is a telltale sign that you have overclocked over the ability of the card, and you would normally back off the overclock a notch and leave it there. Since I am not overclocking, it must be heat related.This should NEVER happen if you are not overclocking the card, which I am not doing.

Hi I can also confrim that my system which i only built a few months ago, nothing on my rig is overclocked. Cheers shaun

I posted a comment at http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtop...00#entry1034516 so we shall see what they say. I may do a rollback to an older driver, not sure yet. So 70% it is. I wear headphones anyway so the noise doesn't bother me. 8^)

With 197.13, I installed the Nvidia "Performance Tools", which add the OC'ing and fan controls - and profiles - pages to Nvidia Control Panel.I can't get these things to work for love nor money. I can manually change the clocks and fan speed, but the "Save to Profile" button never lights up, it's always ghosted out and unusable. Every time it asks if I want it to load when Windows loads, I say yes, but it never does. Anyway, my texture flashing came back again, despite high fan speeds and reasonable GPU temps. It's something in the cfg file. When it was all working perfectly a few days ago, I backed up that fsx.cfg file. I guess I made some changes, or something changed, I don't know, today they were happening bad. It's where a geometric shape, usually water, will flash to plain white for a split second and then back again. It never happens in the sky or clouds, and rarely on land. I restored that known good CFG from a few days ago, and presto, it went away again. Some clues. It does not happen in windowed mode. It does not happen in any other 3D game/application. It does not happen in DX10 Preview mode. There are just sooooo many variables. drivers, heat, 3rd party textures, dx9 vs dx10, 1000 different cfg settings, nhancer and it's many settings. and so on.

Yes, I think primarily the issues are heat related with this driver. I am cranking my fan speed for now manually with Riva Tuner. And Yes, it is too many variables. I never get the flashing white water, but I do see the black squares where lights should be on occasion. I have given up trying to fix that as EVERYBODY has that issue, even ATI owners apparently.You know, I think somewhere along the down-line of driver development, both companies went with a change that broke something and it propagated to every card on the market today (I'm referring to the black squares issue here). The heating appears to be nVidia driver related, not ATI as far as I know.

Yes, I think primarily the issues are heat related with this driver. I am cranking my fan speed for now manually with Riva Tuner. And Yes, it is too many variables. I never get the flashing white water, but I do see the black squares where lights should be on occasion. I have given up trying to fix that as EVERYBODY has that issue, even ATI owners apparently.You know, I think somewhere along the down-line of driver development, both companies went with a change that broke something and it propagated to every card on the market today (I'm referring to the black squares issue here). The heating appears to be nVidia driver related, not ATI as far as I know.

Dolph, how did you get Rivatuner working? When I tried it, it said "no supported driver" or some such.

Hey Ziffel,I assume you are running Windows 7, but pay attention to your OS, as there are versions for 32 and 64 bit. The file you want for 64 bit is RivaTuner224c-[Guru3D.com].zip at Guru 3D. If you install and still get that error, you might read on the forums at Guru 3D for an answer. Other than that, I haven't a clue.

Hey Ziffel,I assume you are running Windows 7, but pay attention to your OS, as there are versions for 32 and 64 bit. The file you want for 64 bit is RivaTuner224c-[Guru3D.com].zip at Guru 3D. If you install and still get that error, you might read on the forums at Guru 3D for an answer. Other than that, I haven't a clue.

Thanks. As it turned out, the error I was getting from RivaTuner was about it not being able to load an unsigned driver in Win7-64. It asked if I wanted to turn off driver signing, reboot, then enable it. I did, and of course it didn't work. Just kept saying the same thing over in a loop. After googling around, I found that RivaTuner appears to be, for the most part, a dead project and the dev is now producing updated RivaTuner re-packs in the form of MSI Afterburner, and EVGA Precision Tools, that I know of. I got Afterburner, and it worked great. I set it up to do a dynamic fan control based on GPU temp, and it's working.

Thanks. As it turned out, the error I was getting from RivaTuner was about it not being able to load an unsigned driver in Win7-64. It asked if I wanted to turn off driver signing, reboot, then enable it. I did, and of course it didn't work. Just kept saying the same thing over in a loop. After googling around, I found that RivaTuner appears to be, for the most part, a dead project and the dev is now producing updated RivaTuner re-packs in the form of MSI Afterburner, and EVGA Precision Tools, that I know of. I got Afterburner, and it worked great. I set it up to do a dynamic fan control based on GPU temp, and it's working.

What motherboard are you using? I have 197.13 drivers and use Rivatuner to increase and decrease my fan speed with no problem, but I was thinking about giving Afterburner a try.By the way, I have not had any problems with my GPU fan since I switched to the 197.13 drivers.

What motherboard are you using? I have 197.13 drivers and use Rivatuner to increase and decrease my fan speed with no problem, but I was thinking about giving Afterburner a try.By the way, I have not had any problems with my GPU fan since I switched to the 197.13 drivers.

I have a Gigabyte motherboard, and Afterburner works fine for me.