John Hockings Posted June 10, 2008 Share Posted June 10, 2008 I have an nVidia Geforce 8800 GTS 512 in my machine which had the 169.25 drivers. Yesterday I updated the drivers to 175.16. I suffered a very large drop in fps, on average down to around 11-14, when I had been running at 22 limited and pretty much always staying around there. I went right back through settings in FSX, the nVidia control panel, and nHancer, and downloaded the latest version of nHancer, all to little or no effect. Previewing in DX10 did actual improve the rates slightly. I rolled back to my old driver and it was all back to normal, not surprisingly. Don't know too much about the gizzards of computers, but has anyone else had any experience of this? Is it a good idea to try to keep drivers updated, or do updates only fix glitches and not give necessarliy any graphic improvement? cheers prof Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmrich28 Posted June 10, 2008 Share Posted June 10, 2008 Drivers are weird like that..I have the same card as you (except 640mb version) and have been running 169.28 Vista 32 drivers since I got FSX and have had no problems. I am following a post at Guru3d about 177.26 version which I may try in a couple of days. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Virtualwombat Posted June 10, 2008 Share Posted June 10, 2008 I always keep the drivers updated and have never had a problem like the one you describe. Did you clean out the remains of the old driver before you installed the new one? Sometimes just deleting a driver is not enough and I always use Driver Cleaner Pro (freeware) after deleting a driver before installing a new one. That said, new drivers are sometimes released to fix problems with new games that are quite unrelated to your particular apps, and therefore you will see no improvement to your system. But you rarely see any deterioration either. On balance, it is best to keep graphics drivers up to date. The same goes for Bios and Chipset drivers, although this can be more dangerous if you don't do enough research. Cheers, noel. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goober Posted June 10, 2008 Share Posted June 10, 2008 Yeah, I updated to those drivers too. Wasn't happy at all. Went back to the previous version. Did notice however, that the download size for the new version was quite a bit smaller than the previous. Yeah weid! Hunsi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jgruschow Posted June 10, 2008 Share Posted June 10, 2008 I'm running the 7516 drivers dated 2/05/08. I find them a vast improvement Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maurice_King Posted June 11, 2008 Share Posted June 11, 2008 Some systems respond well to driver update BUT when doing an update sometimes the tweaks you have set are removed which means you will need to reset the tweaks. THIS could explain the FPS Drop if you hadn't re tweaked the Vid Settings in Windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Hockings Posted June 11, 2008 Author Share Posted June 11, 2008 Hi all and thanks for the responses. Just for the record, if others do experience similar issues, it appears to me that nVidia instructions for Vista installation do not require one to remove old drivers first, then reboot. They seem to indicate the new installer will not require the same procedures as for XP in this sense. I did spend a few hours adding and replacing old tweaks settings etc, but all to no avail. About then I realised I coud use system restore to get back to where I was before installing the new nvidia drivers. Fortunately the last restore point saved was only one day ago. Next time before I try anything like this I will make sure there is a recent restore point, or make one, before I experiment with new updates to OS or drivers. prof Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ken Hall Posted June 11, 2008 Share Posted June 11, 2008 I'm using 174.7 and they seem great also vista 64 with 8800 gts Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmrich28 Posted June 13, 2008 Share Posted June 13, 2008 ran these drivers (177.26 beta) for 5 half hour flights and are stable and improved frame rate by appx 5 avg ( not a big deal but...) I'm on Vista 32 system..More of just if you want to try em reply than anything Dave Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Hockings Posted June 14, 2008 Author Share Posted June 14, 2008 Thanks Dave I'll try to find them now. cheers prof Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heiko Glatthorn Posted June 14, 2008 Share Posted June 14, 2008 Like Virtualwombat mentioned above it is really important to use a driver cleaner. The remains of old drivers can cause conflicts/performance issues. Here's the procedure i go through when i update the GPU driver : -Uninstalling via windows uninstaller -Booting into safe mode (F8) -Running the driver cleaner in safe mode -Running the registry cleaner in safe mode -Installing the new driver in safe mode -Normal boot -Readjusting settings Currently i use 174.85 64bit and i am quiet satisfied. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.