Great results with new nVidia Detonator Driver (43.45)

[Guest]

I crossed my fingers and installed the new Detonator drivers (ver 43.45) last night and to my surprise, the results were quite good. First of all, many of you saw the flickering of textures on the outside view of the aircraft with the previous Detonator driver. This has been fixed with the new version! :) I did some reading and discovered this may have had something to do with texture corruption on the previous driver (especially on GeForce 3 cards). I noticed some new options on the driver optimization/setup. There were wide range of settings for anisotropic filtering. With this filtering turned up along with texture sharpening checked, I get nice views of Terrascened scenery. As far as performance, my MSI Starforce GeForce3 128MB performs about the same as it did before. With detail cranked up, I'm getting about 20 fps on detailed airports and my custom satellite scenery. I've read some benchmarks that show owners of GeForce 4 cards may see a slight performance increase with the new drivers.I'm using these settings:Intellisample Setting: QualityAnisotropic Filtering: 8Texture Sharpening: OnAntialiasing: 2xMipmap Detail: BestObviously, you don't get the clarity on these screenshots given the JPG compression, but I thought I'd share them anyway. They are flying over Leadville (LXV) using some satellite scenery I've been working on for a while now. The second shows the Lancair Columbia that Jarno and I have been working on.http://home.earthlink.net/~finsdad/FlyII/p...es/TBM_Lake.jpghttp://home.earthlink.net/~finsdad/FlyII/p...lumbia_Lake.jpghttp://home.earthlink.net/~finsdad/FlyII/p...kyhawk_Lake.jpg

[Guest]

Very nice!Lancair please?

[Guest tonyc]

I had to go to an earlier dirver becasue this one alwyays corrupted my screen in system stand by mode.tony

[Guest Dean]

Hmm, I was wondering why I suddenly had this problem. I have been using this driver for a while without the corruption problem but it suddenly started a few days ago. I think it may have started because I changed my desktop to 32 bit color.

[Guest]

I haven't seen the screen corruption issue on my pc. It just goes to show you that new driver versions can cause problems as well as fix them. I will say that for me, this new driver seems to be an improvement. For those with the boldness to try it, it might help. As Dean and Tony have pointed out, be ready to roll back if you have problems. To this day (in all driver versions), I can't fly without 100% clear visibility because otherwise, I get these bands that spread across the sky starting from the tops of mountains coming from the direction of the sun. I guess I've accepted the fact that I can only fly on clear days!

[Guest]

I have a corruption issue with my MSI GF3 returning from standby.Its not bad... just the modem icon... turns all black. If I disconnect and redial, all is well. Weird eh?This is with 4109.

[Guest dajackman]

Cool - I tried the settings that you are using...I get a lot better quality with about the same performance. Not bad!

[RandallR 444]

Thanks for pointing out the new drivers. It seems whenever I check nVidia, nothing new has been posted (kind of like watching water boil).I gave it a try and I am pleased with the results. The flickering is finally gone, the image quality is improved and the performance is holding steady. The settings I'm using are similar to yours, but I have made a few changes that work better with my system.Also, for those of you who install the new drivers, I would remind you that every new video driver install dumps the Screen Refresh Rate for the monitor back to the default of 60 Hertz - don't forget to change it to a higher frequency.

[MELKOR 5]

In my case (GeForce 3 Ti500, WinXP, Athlon XP 1900, 512MB RAM), I've noticied a VAST improvement in FPS. I don't have exact numbers, but in the past, the mouse cursor has always seemed to be moving around in molasses - now, it's perfectly fluid! I'm not sure what NVIDIA has done, but it's really made my Fly!ing less painful!Way to go NVIDIA! :D- MELKOR

[Guest]

Randall,I am running 29.42 drivers on a GForce4 Ti4600Do I need to uninstall these,before I install a new driver.Rodger.

[Guest tonyc]

Absolutely. First go into the "settingsadvancedadapterchange and then get it so that you're picking the vga(pci) card under Microsoft, I believe. This will restart the computer in vga and without the nvidia drivers. From here, you repeat the above ecxcept you pick the new driver from the folder in which you've installed it. If the new nvidia driver is an exe file, simply double click on it. The rule is that you must allways install a new graphic driver from vga(pci). Be careful when you go from a newer driver to an older. Some of the files may conflict and create some problems for you. for this, find the detonator eliminator program. This will remove any trace of it. It's tricky, but ask before you try. tony

[RandallR 444]

Well, so much for that. :-)Actually, the above by Tony is certainly appropriate w/Win98x, but for XP, just run the nVidia uninstall from the Control Panel. When the computer reboots, it will "refind" the card and load the VGA drivers automatically.You can then proceed to install the new.

[Guest tonyc]

Randall is absolutely correct. I forgot that I was referring to WIN98.tony