Nvidia Forceware 158.18

[jporter]

I'm unable to force 100hz with counterstrike 1.6 on these drivers :s

[Malisk]

I'm happy to see no worsened 2D / Aero performance here, so it seems to be special cases and although shared by an unfortunate few people, not an overly general problem. There was one guy posting he saw the same on his install. *shrug* I'm on a Geforce 8800GTS and Vista 32-bit anyway. Otherwise, it sounds like most are seeing performance improvements with these, some pretty substantial.

[sngx1275]

I'm having terrible luck with them, haven't tried the leaked 165s yet. Same problems have been displayed since before the 100.65 (tried 100.65, 101.70, 158.18, and whatever was just before 100.65). But here are what I'm seeing:

This is what you see when Vista asks for your permission to do something. Notice how the continue button isn't even visible initially.

Now the continue button appears when the mouse is hovered over where you guess the button to be.

That is what happens if you open an app that forces it into classic mode.

login screen (obviously)

Motherboard chipset drivers are updated, motherboard bios is up to date, not temperature related - happens on cold boot at login screen - doesn't get worse in games, RAM is fine (memtested).

Setup is dual monitor (benq 20.1) with an AGP eVGA 7800GS CO (at shipped speeds, not overclocked past what evga did). No evident problems in XP.

Previous drivers have been uninstalled through removing via the new add/remove program thing whatever its called.

Vista 32bit.

[Vice]

I'm using these drivers on x64, they are amazing. Great drivers.

[Cosmin]

are these drivers still beta ?

[sngx1275]

Yes, the 158.18s are still beta, just were released yesterday.

[Cosmin]

and 100.65 too ?

[Ambroos]

Nope... These are on the nVidia site as official, non-beta drivers for the nVidia Geforce 6, 7 and 8xxx series... If you have a Geforce FX you should use older drivers as told on the website.

[sngx1275]

From the http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_158.18.html

Windows Vista 32-bit

ForceWare Release 158

Version: 158.18

Release Date: April 17, 2007

Beta Driver

[Cosmin]

ohh yeah :( .. so sad .. when they'll release the final version for 158.18 ?

[-Pats]

ohh yeah :( .. so sad .. when they'll release the final version for 158.18 ?

check guru3d regularly for updates, or the nvidia driver site

http://www.guru3d.com/

[0sit0]

installed... as soon as i restarted the screen went crazy couldn't see anything so had to do a system restore :(

[GuJu]

i cnat evan install it on my vista, 6800

[drumthrasher109]

Heres some screenshots.

Oh but before I post them how do you get nTune to work? If you have it working with this firmware could you please post all the proper download links?

All of the other menu's look the same.

[+Elі Subscriber²]

They work very good for me, even removed all traces of previous drivers that were installed before then it preceded to the installation of the new driver.

[MistaJista]

Here are the 158.18 drivers with all resolutions and refresh rates available..... nVidia quality control is a larf ain't it ? :-)

http://www.sendspace.com/file/5403r6

[Madcat676]

I own 2 Geforce 6800's in SLi and I iinstalled the 158.18 drivers. The first time through I did what they said and it gave me a blue screen so what I did was I went into Safe Mode manually Uninstalled the Drivers and then booted back into Vista, installed them again and havn't had a problem

[Enphenate]

:pinch: after i tried installing this driver on my 7800gtx with vista32 i kept getting constant blue screen loops.... it would only load in safe mode, and even after removing and installing again in safe mode it kept crashing before it even gets to the log in screen...

im kind of over vista, ive had it since the RTM and its dope and all but theres so many annoying things in it that don't work or just bug you... i think im gonna go back to xp tonight for at least a couple of months if the 165.01 release is also all buggy....

=|

[drumthrasher109]

How is Vista bad for you? Vista is sooooooooooooo freaking good for me!!!! Sooooo much better than XP!

[Enphenate]

i like vista a lot but it just bugs me that creative are effing everyone over with their bootleg drivers, and nvidia are releasing some pretty crappy drivers aswell....

going to wait a couple of months until dx10 games fully come out and all the drivers/programs are atleast a bit more mature...

[Malisk]

installed... as soon as i restarted the screen went crazy couldn't see anything so had to do a system restore :(

As soon as I *uninstalled* my older drivers, screen went black and I had to press the reset button. :/

But after that it was installed, but Vista had picked up on an older version, so I installed those too. :)

Then I was good to go and everything went smoothly here at least.

I'm having terrible luck with them, haven't tried the leaked 165s yet. Same problems have been displayed since before the 100.65 (tried 100.65, 101.70, 158.18, and whatever was just before 100.65).

Ugghh, that looks horrible. :( Worst I've seen yet... I hope you can at least revert back your old ones? But I wonder why that happened to you, it really look like some severe kind of incompatibility. :huh: Maybe things will get better with the 165's, however most have been saying they're more unstable than these on many levels. You haven't overclocked anything either, right? Just in case these are more sensitive to that. I think bad screen artifacts like this can sometimes happen with that.

Edited April 19, 2007 by Jugalator

[sngx1275]

Jugalator - Its just factory overclocked from eVGA. Never had any problems in XP, and it happens like that on the login screen from a cold boot so its not temp related. Only occurs under certain circumstances like I described in that post. I am not having any "stability" problems others are. I haven't tried the 165s yet, didn't have time tonight, may do it tomorrow.

Edit - The problem I'm having apparently is really set off by classic mode. Switching to that mode manually causes absolutely terrible corruption, to the point I have to guess where things are to click. Any chance this could be something else in Vista other than the drivers?

Edited April 19, 2007 by sngx1275

[Jamel]

I've installed these drivers and now my screen goes blank and needs a hard reset when attempting to Watch TV. The Control Panel is excessively more responsive though.

[paesan]

Drivers work great with my 7800gtx card on x64 ultimate. I like the new way that these drivers install. They first uninstall previous drivers. I must have had 3 versions still in there because on each restart setup detected previous drivers. These are a great improvement for me.

[sngx1275]

Update on my problem:

The problem is now "fixed", how I was able to fix it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me right now, but in years of dealing with problems in Windows odd things like this tend to happen.

I first updated to the 165s, this was done without uninstalling the 158.18 drivers. I had no intention of not removing the 158s, I went under the assumption that since the 158s had a built in uninstaller for the older drivers that the 165s would as well, they did not. Once rebooted the 165s seemed possibly slightly better, the corruption went from nearly completely unusable in Classic to only slightly better than nearly completely unusable. From here on out I was keeping it in Classic mode and struggling to read the text (often times having to move the window and read the 'ghost' to make out the text).

At this point I had the idea to check and see if Rollback contained several versions (I'd seen elsewhere once in Vista where it showed what drivers were installed when) and to see if maybe I could roll back to whatever came before the 100.65s. Turns out when I clicked Rollback Driver it did what it does in XP and just went to the previous, which was the 158.18s. The corruption was still there, so before even exiting device manager I clicked uninstall driver.

Once at the login for Vista after uninstalling, it was at some horrible resolution, but the colors looked ok and the login screen had no corruption. Once at the desktop I immediately went to change the resolution, only to find out it wouldn't scale up to 1680x1050, 1440x900 or something similar was shown, so I picked it. Now with the display slightly better I decided to see what driver version Vista was using. It properly identified my card in Device Manager (so why wasn't I getting 1680x1050 like the first boot after installing Vista?) and said I was using 97.46? Then I clicked on Update Driver (from within device manager) because I'd resigned myself to having to install a newer version since I apparently removed something important that Vista wasn't going to replace. I let it connect online and to my suprise it said I was up to date.

Discouraged and and running out of lunch hour I just clicked ok and was prepared to head back to work, but then Vista said it needed to reboot for changes to be made, wtf?! The shutdown screen looked like it dropped to 8 bit color so that was a little concerning, but when Vista came back up all looked good, I was still at the 1440 resolution so I went to see if I could get it changed to 1680x1050, and sure enough I could.

I'm still in Windows Classic theme at this point, still corruption free. Expecting corruption to hit in full force at any minute I enabled the 2nd monitor (extend desktop onto this monitor) and all went well there. After closing out of that I decided to jump into Aero. That also went smoothly. Now for the big test I went back to classic. No corruption! So I jumped back into Aero and decided I'd launch Trillian which for some reason (quicktime alternative install?) only recently decided to bump Vista out of Aero. When an app forces Vista into Classic it doesn't drop to the full Windows Classic theme, instead it drops into a Vista like theme just without Aero enabled. Once again no corruption!

So I think the problem is "fixed". Now what I have to deal with is running the old 97.46? drivers. All of these nvidia updates are fixing a multitude of issues, so now I wonder how long it will be before things start crashing like everyone else that has had problems are seeing. I'm scared to update again for fear of causing the problem all over again.

My gut feeling is somehow files were still getting left behind from previous drivers, despite following nvidia's removal instructions, and that they were the root cause. I think that if I install the 158.18 drivers that I'll still be corruption free, I'm not sure I want to risk that at this point though. Maybe if things start crashing on me I will. Hopefully setting a restore point while things are working would allow me to get a corruption free desktop back if the new drivers cause problems again.