Anyone else having trouble with nvidia drivers?

ReAPeR101 · 13 Jan 2012 at 10:00

Deception said:
On the 290.53 drivers here and not had any kind of issues. Saying that, I dont think I've had any issues with Nvidia ones yet.

AGREED. +1

Everytime i have updated my drivers never had any issues, that includes way back to a 8600 GT

Like others have said, if your having issues with your GPU drivers, then i personally think you have underlying issues with your OS or system hardware in general

Gregster · 13 Jan 2012 at 10:56

I have always swapped between ATI and NVIDIA and have always been ok....Sure I get the odd problem but using google has always come back with a soloution.
I generally find if people are playing the game and I am not, then it is something my end (or a fix for my hardware is needed).
I find the biggest bug I have with BF3 is that damned "Punkbuster" Always I end up at some stage getting kicked because punkbuster hates me and then I have to go and manually update it (which does not always work first time)

My moan over.....Glad you got it fixed and see you on the field

Havana_UK · 13 Jan 2012 at 11:27

Thinking of going to ATI next time because of their drivers!?!?!? I LOL'd

I've only ever had issues with beta releases of nVidia drivers and I've used nVidia cards ever since Riva TNT. I had some issues most recently with the BF3 beta drivers, but since the full release BF3 drivers not had any problems.

ALXAndy · 13 Jan 2012 at 12:11

Havana_UK said:
Thinking of going to ATI next time because of their drivers!?!?!? I LOL'd

I've only ever had issues with beta releases of nVidia drivers and I've used nVidia cards ever since Riva TNT. I had some issues most recently with the BF3 beta drivers, but since the full release BF3 drivers not had any problems.

Nvidia drivers are pretty bad at the moment.

I think half of the problems relate back to them having to support so much stuff in them now.

They have CUDA for the folders and media folk.
They have Physx
They have 3D
They have surround and stereoscopic 3D and so on.

Due to all of that when they fix one thing they break others. For example when I used 27x drivers in surround they were wonderful. Sadly new games refused to boot. But, in every driver after that Quad SLI did not work as well and surround had issues. Firstly it detected the wrong resolution and you could not apply the correct res in the Nvidia control panel.

This meant I had to basically force the res using Windows. Then when the screens refreshed the entire bar at the bottom of the screen would lose the aero effect and then come back. It was pretty bad.

And then, even though they said that the 29x driver fixed BF3 more it simply broke it completely on my cards.

What they need is a dev team for each of their technologies who can code drivers per specific models. IE - a team for the 5 series, a team for the 2 series and so on.

If I'm completely honest I haven't had problems with AMD/ATI drivers since 2002. I used to have a Radeon 7800 or something and it used to BSOD on my motherboard (Intel dual xeon in a SGI 550). But on single cards they have been absolutely fine.

mickeyfinagin · 13 Jan 2012 at 17:26

Not to sure if its Nvidia drivers or just BF3 is still not 100%.

I have a Zotac gtx 570, my mate a Zotac 560Ti, latest Beta drivers loaded.
Both have the same sort of lock up/ crashes occasionally. Bf3 also seems to make the cards run quite hot after a while compared to other games. This my be part of the issue.

mickeyfinagin · 13 Jan 2012 at 18:12

Ah, just read Havana_uk comment.
looks like my issue could be Nvidia beta driver related.

coupe69 · 13 Jan 2012 at 21:01

ALXAndy said:
Nvidia drivers are pretty bad at the moment.

No they're not. I can't remember the last time I had any major issues with Nvidia drivers, In fact I can't remember the last time I had any issues with Nvidia drivers full stop!

A list of my more recent Nvidia cards I've owned including SLi configurations without any significant issues:

7600 GT SLi,
8800 GTS 640MB,
8800 GT,
8800 Ultra,
GTX 280,
GTX 260 SLi,
GTX 480.

ALXAndy said:
Quad SLI did not work as well

I do wish you'd stop banging on about how bad your quad SLi 295s are, If they're really as dreadful as you say they are then just sell the bloody things instead of constantly moaning about them! Most people do not have 4 (dated) GPUs in their systems so will not have the problems you're obviously encountering. The fact of the matter is the vast majority of Nvidia owners have very few if any driver issues and I suspect the tiny percentage that do is more down to a case of PEBKAC.....

titaniumx3 · 13 Jan 2012 at 22:27

That's the problem really, forums like this tend magnify any faults immensely. If people complemented nvidia/AMD everytime a driver install went fine, we'd get a much more accurate picture, something like a 10:1 ratio of positive/negative experiences. Out of those that are negative, 75% are probably down to user error.

Biffa · 24 Jan 2012 at 01:44

coupe69 said:
The fact of the matter is the vast majority of Nvidia owners have very few if any driver issues and I suspect the tiny percentage that do is more down to a case of PEBKAC.....

Swap Nvidia for Ati/AMD and I think the sentance is true as well. Having had pretty much every generation of each manufacturer over the years I've had little to no trouble

Cupra · 24 Jan 2012 at 02:40

Biffa said:
Swap Nvidia for Ati/AMD and I think the sentance is true as well. Having had pretty much every generation of each manufacturer over the years I've had little to no trouble

but you keep up2 date dont you? its when you crossfire 2 cards that are not current gen that amd have all the problems as they just drop support for them

gurusan · 24 Jan 2012 at 03:13

What kind of enthusiast has crossfire but doesn't update drivers? :/

drunkenmaster · 24 Jan 2012 at 04:12

gurusan said:
What kind of enthusiast has crossfire but doesn't update drivers? :/

Smart ones, people who upgrade their driver every four seconds, simply incapable of understanding a hotfix for one game is just as liable to break another, and those going after every hotfix which is a beta, nothing more or less, have infinitely more trouble than those who stick with older drivers and all of 3% less performance.

I still don't jump on every single new driver just for the sake of it even though I've not had xfire for a while.

95%+ of AMD and Nvidia "driver" problems are user error, and 99% of those people who post about their problems refuse to accept decent advice and just install driver after driver after driver.

coupe69 said:
No they're not. I can't remember the last time I had any major issues with Nvidia drivers, In fact I can't remember the last time I had any issues with Nvidia drivers full stop!

A list of my more recent Nvidia cards I've owned including SLi configurations without any significant issues:

7600 GT SLi,
8800 GTS 640MB,
8800 GT,
8800 Ultra,
GTX 280,
GTX 260 SLi,
GTX 480.

What you've said makes no sense and has no relevance, go on NVIDIA'S own forums, the TDR thing has been peeing off MANY people for a pretty long time, there are plenty of issues with Nvidia drivers, they just do a better job of keeping them quite. The AMD forums are horrible, not easily accessible, and badly supported. nvidia's are good so people with problems go straight to Nvidia so you see less moaning on here.

it's really that simple, AMD and Nvidia have driver issues, AMD are NOT worse than nvidia and lately Nvidia have been the more problematic. The "major" AMD effected issues like [H] banging on about xfire/new drivers/new game support, are down to user error normally. He made a huge deal about Startrek Online and dx11 not working properly...... when in fact both dx9 mode is faster, dx11 offers little to no IQ improvement, and other people have DX mode working fine with an increase in performance that AFAIK keeps it well ahead of Nvidia as they are ahead in dx9 as well.

The vast majority of "big game release problems", are problems that effected Nvidia AND AMD, some of them AMD sorted out faster, and they were problems with the game, not in particular either companies drivers.

Skyrim is cpu limited mostly, Rage was just a horrific pile of crap and I can't even think what the other one was, loads of complaining about AMD's terrible drivers, when Nvidia had every one of the same problems, its utterly mental the blind "Nvidia drivers just work" stance on here, old reputations don't die, ever.

xsistor · 24 Jan 2012 at 04:32

Keeping telling yourself that, if it makes you feel better.

Biffa · 24 Jan 2012 at 09:35

Cupra said:
but you keep up2 date dont you? its when you crossfire 2 cards that are not current gen that amd have all the problems as they just drop support for them

No usually I'm a couple of versions of drivers behind, I probably update every other release.

I've been mainly on Nvidia the past couple of years but have clients with AMD builds and of course test the new cards as they come out for kicks and giggles, and usually try them out to see if its worth while swapping on one rig or the other, sometimes it is, sometimes its not. Last long term AMD cards I have had were HD5870's

Final8y · 24 Jan 2012 at 11:43

drunkenmaster said:
Smart ones, people who upgrade their driver every four seconds, simply incapable of understanding a hotfix for one game is just as liable to break another, and those going after every hotfix which is a beta, nothing more or less, have infinitely more trouble than those who stick with older drivers and all of 3% less performance.

I still don't jump on every single new driver just for the sake of it even though I've not had xfire for a while.

95%+ of AMD and Nvidia "driver" problems are user error, and 99% of those people who post about their problems refuse to accept decent advice and just install driver after driver after driver.

What you've said makes no sense and has no relevance, go on NVIDIA'S own forums, the TDR thing has been peeing off MANY people for a pretty long time, there are plenty of issues with Nvidia drivers, they just do a better job of keeping them quite. The AMD forums are horrible, not easily accessible, and badly supported. nvidia's are good so people with problems go straight to Nvidia so you see less moaning on here.

it's really that simple, AMD and Nvidia have driver issues, AMD are NOT worse than nvidia and lately Nvidia have been the more problematic. The "major" AMD effected issues like [H] banging on about xfire/new drivers/new game support, are down to user error normally. He made a huge deal about Startrek Online and dx11 not working properly...... when in fact both dx9 mode is faster, dx11 offers little to no IQ improvement, and other people have DX mode working fine with an increase in performance that AFAIK keeps it well ahead of Nvidia as they are ahead in dx9 as well.

The vast majority of "big game release problems", are problems that effected Nvidia AND AMD, some of them AMD sorted out faster, and they were problems with the game, not in particular either companies drivers.

Skyrim is cpu limited mostly, Rage was just a horrific pile of crap and I can't even think what the other one was, loads of complaining about AMD's terrible drivers, when Nvidia had every one of the same problems, its utterly mental the blind "Nvidia drivers just work" stance on here, old reputations don't die, ever.

If you thought that the AMD forum was bad before, it has just got even worse, totally useless now.
I do look in on the NV forum and NV subsections on other sites now and then and every time im surprised because the way some people like to portray NV in general out side of the NV forum and NV subsections.
I have no issues with peoples personal experiences, its the generalizing that is the problem which contradicts the reality.

SouthEastBlue · 24 Jan 2012 at 20:47

I've had weird problems with random freezes in BF3 lately using the newest Nvidia beta drivers.

I uninstalled the driver, used driver sweeper in safe mode, then reinstalled the latest WHQL driver and all has been fixed thank god.

No idea what was wrong with the beta driver, but it was a PITA!

coupe69 · 24 Jan 2012 at 21:08

drunkenmaster said:
What you've said makes no sense, bleet, bleet, bleet.

I really didn't think my post was that hard to understand?

I'm not sure I can simplify it anymore for you tbh, but I'll try.

I have no driver issues innit bruv!

How's that?

Rroff · 24 Jan 2012 at 21:18

drunkenmaster said:
it's really that simple, AMD and Nvidia have driver issues, AMD are NOT worse than nvidia and lately Nvidia have been the more problematic.

Rubbish - yes they both have problems, the difference that most people seem to be completely blind to is (a) the scale of the problem(s) (b) the different approach by the different vendors to dealing with these problems.

drunkenmaster said:
The vast majority of "big game release problems", are problems that effected Nvidia AND AMD, some of them AMD sorted out faster, and they were problems with the game, not in particular either companies drivers.

Skyrim is cpu limited mostly, Rage was just a horrific pile of crap and I can't even think what the other one was, loads of complaining about AMD's terrible drivers, when Nvidia had every one of the same problems, its utterly mental the blind "Nvidia drivers just work" stance on here, old reputations don't die, ever.

For all the issues with RAGE - the driver issues were overwhelmingly AMD failings and not actual game issues, if you look at the patch notes there are dozens of work arounds they had to put in place where AMD were not supporting standard features properly. nVidia typically have better support for new release games (even if it isn't perfect) - you have to be blind not to see it - skyrim, bf3 and RAGE are just some instances of that.

Craig_81 · 25 Jan 2012 at 03:22

Originally Posted by coupe69
No they're not. I can't remember the last time I had any major issues with Nvidia drivers, In fact I can't remember the last time I had any issues with Nvidia drivers full stop!

Just because you haven't had any problems it doesn't mean they don't exist! I have just returned my 560 Ti because of the annoying TDR issues that the drivers were causing. Nvidia are also well aware of the "issues", see below:-
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=215256&st=780&p=1355202&#entry1355202

gronf · 25 Jan 2012 at 05:44

Bit off-topic, but when will nvidia release new WHQL drivers? I'm running the latest ones, 285.62 from October... or is that not a big gap?