pouët.net

I guess this might interest some of you. Yesterday I found out that the latest detonators have a rather nasty habit of crashing computer always with software rendered demos in 640x480 resolution. I tried prods from differend groups etc. and all the ones with that resolution crashed with black screen so that only reseting helped.

So, in case anyone of you has Win2k and gf2mx - don't update your detonators if you want to still watch software rendered demos. Downgrading the drivers back to 28.32 solved the problem.

And yes, nVidia has been informed about this.

There have been a number of problems with D3D/OpenGL accelerated software under Windows 2000 with some of the Detonator drivers and NVidia chips (even Geforce 4 Ti ) ...
Seems like Nvidia should hire some driver developers who know what they are doing and improove their quality management :/

In general, if you have a GeForce 1 or 2, the 30.xx drivers and on won't really be any better than what you have. They're really geared toward GF3 and 4 cards. I'm still using 22.50 for my GF2 Pro.

Phoenix: actually, the 22.50 drivers are pretty broken regarding dx8-features, so you'd be better off using, say, 28.*

I also encountered several probs with gfIImx and later detonators (like incorrect switchback to desktop resolution or crashes when a demo ended)
but maybe my system needs some reinstall...
does someone have similar probs ? I'd really like to use later drivers (~18% faster) but if they fuck up my box it's not much fun.

Some demos need quite new drivers to run correctly, but I think I will not upgrade my 29.42 drivers for the next time. Speedwise it makes no matter with my TNT2, no current driver is TNT2 optimized

isn't it great how we left the time of DOS and all sorts of incompatibilities behind us ;)

On a DOS system with proper configuration the most demos were running without bigger problems and with a bit luck it's even possible to show quite a number of demos or intros without a reboot.
The only thing which I don't know from Windows demos are random crashes.

Running 23.11 here on my Geforce 2Ti. Anything newer and I get occasional BSODs with some prods. It is true that more recent drivers are primarily intended for newer chipsets and cause more trouble than joy on older cards.

Also, as stated at another thread, I expect the card manufacturer to protect me from a lazy/inexperienced D3D/OGL programmer. I am willing to sacrifice a little performance for that or at least have the freedom to choose between a stable/fast system.

I have tried the 23.11 drivers one time (at this time I was running the 22.80 drivers) and I was not really lucky with them. There was a noticeable difference in the synching of the demo Medium and I had the overall feeling that the drivers are performing more worse than the 22.80 ones. But normally there is no real difference between the drivers for me and actually I have stopped to run beta drivers.

melw: I code softwarerendering myself with those drivers and a gf2mx, and I havent had any problems like that, except from when running in OpenGL.

kusma, what configuration do you have more precicely? here:

- windows 2000 with sp3
- gainward geforce2 mx 200
- athlon xp 1800+
- asus a7s333
- 512mb ddr

also for some reason 640x480 was the only resolution that crashed my computer. running e.g. some older 320x240 ddraw intros worked just fine.

melw:

windows 2000 sp3
gainward gf2mx-400 64mb
athlon t-bird 1400
dunnowhatthefuckmainboard (VIA-something)
256mb sdram

i have worked with 640x480 a bit, havent had any trouble with it...

in hardware? :)

I'm using 40.41 on both GF2 GTS/Pro (at home) and GF4 Ti4600 (at work) and both work as they should. No noticeable bugs so far