NVIDIA and the 8800

[bigdog632 0]

im not trying to start yet another 8800 problem issue but i was on the BTS site and the 8800 crashing was considered a driver issue....

so i went to nvidia and was bouncing back and forth between their techies and beta drivers and such without much success

they finally escalated me and the reply from them at that point basically was:

This support website is designed to support products purchased directly from NVIDIA, such as the NVIDIA Dual TV tuner card, NVIDIA Pure Video DVD Decoder, and QuadroPlex. We also address Presales questions about NVIDIA based products and technology. We can only try to help you or point you in the right direction but we cannot resolve all problems outside the scope of our support. If its a driver issue the game developer will need to formally contact NVIDIA Developer Relations.

this may be a stupid question but im gonna ask anyway cuz i have my stupid moments

are you guys in contact with nvidia about the issue?

i know this will prolley start some flame crap and im sorry if it does

[BraTTy 0]

What they are also saying is they only produce a few actual Nvidia cards themselves.They sell the chipset to other makers.

You need to also check with your video cards manufacturer as Nvidia themselves has no control over the quality of components they may be using.

If you have a actual Nvidia videocard they are requesting that the software developer interact with them for the problem rather than the end user.

And another note to think about is I don't believe the 8800 was out when Bis was coding this game so its not likely they would need to interact with Nvidia specifically for the 8800, the makers of the card should ensure backwards compatibility.

We wish everything worked well , technology is advancing so fast

So what actual video card do you own? (MSI,EVGA, Biostar, Asus , Gigabyte etc...)

Back in the day alot of manufacturers needed their OEM drivers for everything to work right depending on what features the card has (DVI , Svideo out etc...)

You should be using the drivers from your OEM card

And to add , I do have nvidia chipset cards too but my laptop is ATI x600 and I mostly HAVE to use the 6.7 catalyst drivers from Gateway support anything else is beta testing (ATI.com drivers won't even install anymore, it stops at the videocard test and says I need to use OEM)

[bigdog632 0]

i understand they only support their stuff....but my card is a BFG and from what i can tell is they use the same drivers....the download page says their drivers are provided by nvidia....heck their download page mirriors nvidias

so from what i can tell their drivers come from nvidia

i have contacted BFG as well however so well see what is said

[shinRaiden 0]

A search of the forums instead of the Big Tub of Spam will tell you that yes, BIS developers have been in contact with Nvidia engineering, and that the principal issue with the 8800's is their different memory management architechture, and the resulting instability that creates when combined with legacy DirectX SDK factors.

A cursory scan of the buzzwords bandied about on the standard fanboy tech review sites should have been sufficent warning that severe stability issues were likely to ensue from the memory manager handler change that underlies the unified shader architecture in silicon. That system, incompatible with DX9 and built specifically for nvidia's interpretation of DX10, requires some rather exotic software hacks on the part of Nvidia engineering to maintain compliance with the legacy deprecated DX9 architecture, which is functionally leaky when exposed to the new code that exploits an unanticipated API weakness.

Call Microsoft and convince them to shelve Vista, and reopen dev on Dx9. Let us know how that goes.

[-Puma- 2]

A search of the forums instead of the Big Tub of Spam will tell you that yes, BIS developers have been in contact with Nvidia engineering, and that the principal issue with the 8800's is their different memory management architechture, and the resulting instability that creates when combined with legacy DirectX SDK factors.

A cursory scan of the buzzwords bandied about on the standard fanboy tech review sites should have been sufficent warning that severe stability issues were likely to ensue from the memory manager handler change that underlies the unified shader architecture in silicon. That system, incompatible with DX9 and built specifically for nvidia's interpretation of DX10, requires some rather exotic software hacks on the part of Nvidia engineering to maintain compliance with the legacy deprecated DX9 architecture, which is functionally leaky when exposed to the new code that exploits an unanticipated API weakness.

Call Microsoft and convince them to shelve Vista, and reopen dev on Dx9. Let us know how that goes.

wow no need to be that harsh

i highly doubt that nvidia will immediatly start fixing they're bugs with the card, when end user comes in with questions as stated above. not sure what's the point of this thread, but i have had some luck with my msi card probs, when i contacted msi techs.

[shinRaiden 0]

Harsh? It's call the search button, and I'm breaking forums rules by posting a friendly explanation in this here duplicated topic.

Anyways, the problem is both a problem and a non-problem. The chips were designed with DX10 in mind. You're trying to use DX9 code on them. The chips don't handle either. They expect magic code to come out of the Nvidia drivers. But the problem is that the magic code doesn't work the same for DX9 and DX10. Well, the particular issue is that DX9 accepts data that it doesn't know how to handle, and malforms it, resulting in slow leaks. This was confirmed months ago by BIS and Nvidia.

So M$ has a problem. Are they going to fix it? Well no, DX9 and XP are dead, long live Vista and DX10. Besides, everything was working fine until Nvidia tried to send in data that DX9 accepts but shouldn't.

So Nvidia's got a problem because their uber DX10 card gets cranky with malformed DX9 code. But if you guarantee a fix in software, kaboom, there goes all your performance. But if you feed bad data into DX, sooner or later you get mud in the system of different sorts.

What's the dev supposed to do, work around issues in hardware, API's, and drivers? How about they just wash their hands of this mess and go back to doing what they do best, and that's make games. Let the other guys sort it out.

Lastly, it's pointless to harass the OEM's about this, there's nothing they can do to the GPU silicon. BFG makes the card, but that's not the problem. So you're wasting their time and yours for a problem they can't do anything about.

[bigdog632 0]

well i finally get an answer in plain english...mostly...

one thing though they havent ditched DX9 100% cuz i did get a 9c update a month or 2 ago...though it didnt seem to affect much of what i do....they did put it out though....

[mattxr 9]

I use XP / BFG 8800 GTX 768mbs

And |Im using the lastest beta drivers for XP 32 bit and i dont get the crash no more.

[bigdog632 0]

noted ill try them out ive gotten them but havent had time to try them

[sickboy 13]

Shin; Fully agree on most parts, but about the Shelf DX10 for a lesser good (DX9)? You are kidding right? Now I have yet to *really* look into the technical sides of DX10, but im guessing as it's mostly rewritten and restructured, that it is the better of the two

Let's get ArmA2 in DX10, how about that

Also, I have been playing ArmA for 100's of hours on my 8800 GTX, with everything on very high, except AA on normal and sometimes switching PostProcessing to low due to some slowdowns here and there, but never ever have I gotten any crashes whatsoever on XP32-bit since the use of -maxmem=512 parameter.

Also, on Vista, now with the latest hotfixes aswell as latest drivers, I have yet to see the crashes after hours of play, even without any -maxmem parameter set, however, longer testing must still be done. But the resolution needed, if any, would prolly be re-adding the -maxmem=512 also on Vista.

When it comes to the black loading screen on Vista, this is resolved by limitting the memory that Vista can use to 3072MB until a real fix is issued either from Nvidia, MS or BI. Prolly one of the first two.

[Hellfire-rty- 0]

All I can say is that I have the vista32 home premium and two 8800 GTS with SLI and have had no problems at all with running anything, especially Arma. That said I did try the latest Nvidia beta drivers and immediately had problems, I uninstalled them and went back to the previous drivers and "bingo" no more problems.

[[aps]gnat 28]

Has this been posted here before ?

Quote[/b] ]Righty oh. Try going to Start -> Run -> type Msconfig -> BOOT.INI tab -> Advanced Options -> Tick Maxmem=3072 -> Ok -> Reboot.

If this doesn't work, make sure to go back and Untick the Maxmem box then reboot, as this will disable 1gb of yer RAM.

Let us know how it goes

Edit: Forgot you are in Vista, looking up the Vista method of doing this now.

Edit 2: Ok it seems you need to run the Command Prompt\Line under Admin account and type:

"bcdedit /set truncatememory 3221225472"

If it doesn't work, to return it

"bcdedit /set truncatememory 4294967296"

This info is what I could find on the MS Knowledgebase, as it seems to have worked for some blokes on the ArmA forums. Good luck

http://forums.ogn.com.au/showthread.php?t=51131

[sickboy 13]

Yes, posted in "Yet-Another" Vista thread.

(I must say that I wish there was more moderation on these threads and more merging or closing. I think there are at or near 50 threads about Vista, 8800, Black load screens and what not)

I didnt post the truncateMemory btw, as you can limit the memory in msConfig in Vista aswell.

Also, the truncateMemory option is less good than removeMemory, where you need to specify how much memory you wish to remove from the total, instead of using truncateMemory to telling the limit itself. Following Microsoft, the RemoveMemory is more reliable.