Guild Wars driver fail woes

Problem: Driver failure leads to bluescreen



Cause: Using the fail beta drivers (174.55). I'm folding and these are the latest Geforce 8 Series CUDA supporting drivers. My previous WHQL logo'd drivers (175.16) worked fine and even fixed some problems I had with Crysis when I used 169.25 drivers.

What to do: I can't change to newer drivers because there are none that support both CUDA and Geforce 8 Series. Any ideas?

Hardware
[email protected] (10 hour Orthos stable)
Nvidia BFG 8800 Ultra OC
Kingston HyperX @ 1000 (underclocked from 1066)
Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi-AP (P965 chipset)

It seems to me that I either ditch folding and go for good drivers or stay with these drivers and fail at playing GW while repetitively minimizing. Don't bother suggesting not to repetitively minimise, it's just the way I play.

And btw I dislike the pretentious CUDA download wizard. It has you choose OS alone - by ignoring actual video card it suggest 177.35 to people without a GTX2*0. Don't ask me how a download wizard can be pretentious, it just is.

Edit: Made a typo that said I had 174.35 rather than 174.55. I hope this hasn't inconvenienced anyone in troubleshooting etc.

Is CUDA support necessary for folding, then? Be a shame to stop that due to a sucky driver.

I read enough in your link to get me intrigued by the subject of folding - but I'm not going to think about it if that's all my computer will be capable of doing!

Yep CUDA support is necessary for folding. To be fair, Guild Wars has ran fine for the past hour and did so yesterday. However, this beta driver is a bit prone to errors. 2 8800GTXs would be great at folding, it would be good for you to get involved once everything comes out of beta ([email protected] app, drivers etc)

Guild Wars Guru folding team FTW! Sponsor us Rahja (nvidia)?

Bump. Any ideas guys? Had a bluescreen yesterday and about 10 million driver failure errors today. Doesn't happen everytime though, been fairly good until tonight. Windows error message:

Then it stops responding again next time I (try) to load Guild Wars.

I honestly have no idea. I have been having that ''Display Driver stopped responding'' thing lately too, my screen goes fully black and then comes back with that message. I haven't been thinking much of it lately, the problems are only recent - along with computer lockups.

I am far too lazy to consider fixing it right now though, if it pisses me off enough then I will. It's either drivers or my video card, and if it's the card then I will throw it over the back fence and hope it gets hit by a bus. I seriously want a new one, but I digress, I'll run some full system checks later.

I am using a 320mb 8800GTS on the drivers from Dec/07, forgot which version those drivers were.

^^ sounds like it is time for you to get the latest drivers. I would hope that new drivers is all it takes to stop your errors.

If drivers have been working fine for several months, then suddenly start playing up, something else is the cause.

New drivers often solve problems like this, but more of a coincidence. It's like a headache getting cured by your anti-malaria tablets, to stretch an analogy somewhat ^^

nvidia + vista + minimize in GW = epic phail, has been like that since day 1 of Vista and will most likely always be, hopefully M$ will put more effort into the next windows and actually make something that works without the developers like Nvidia and Ati having to make new drivers from scratch over and over, Nvidia is the biggest reason why Vista crashes

And as far as the minimize and u saying thats just the way u play
Well if u realy HAVE to minimize , im guessing u switch from fullscreen, never thought about window mode ? that gfx should realy handle it good

but once again vista+nvidia = phail
i'm never again putting Vista on any of my computers
its easier to get linux to work flawless :P

My Guild Wars on Vista works perfect while minimizing from Full screen and Window, it even gets better FPS than my XP does, probably due to the fact that XP seems to suck with my dual core, nothing a hot fix can't fix though.

And my drivers have worked flawlessly from day 1 up until now, I am not even going to wager 100% that it is my drivers or video card, the ''Display Driver resetting'' was and that only ever happened once, but the lockups could be my RAM or PSU, my PSU really sucks and is probably dying.

LOL, sponsorship isn't my department. We could start our own team however. I would donate my PS3 to the cause, because it would make our score huge.

As for CUDA support and 8 Series... umm... I was fairly sure that the 175 release supported CUDA. ARe you positive it doesn't? I can't really look into this atm, but I thought it did.

@!$^, another lockup. I am slowly getting pissed off now.

Ironically after putting in the Corsair ram I get lockups every since, but with the Crucial and Kingston It didn't. (Crucial didn't have heat spreaders, and a stick of Kingston died). I pair all RAM btw, I don't mix/match.

Well, I'll update drivers and see how that goes, probably going to be über facepalm fail.

Sounds more like bad RAM. There may be a mis-match between the two sticks.

Stick with Crucial. Corsair = crappiest stuff made in the entire USA. Evil evil evil RAM. You couldn't PAY me to own it. I would rather stick a fork in my eye then own that stuff.

Well next time I am going with Crucial Ballistix, but like I said I need the ram with heat spreaders, so I had to ditch the Crucial.

Meh oh well. *scratches head*

Btw we're derailing this thread, blah!

Stanford recommends the 174.55 driver for non-GTX cards. http://www.nvidia.com/object/get_cuda2_beta.html

A few things to respond to:
1) This minimize + Vista + Nvidia driver problem only started when I installed CUDA and reverted back to 174.55 drivers (for the CUDA support). Since my original post it has started happening without minimising - but it seems worst with Guild Wars, eg just loading the game causes a driver failure and sometimes bluescreen. To clarify, I had no problems before CUDA and the 174.55 drivers.

2)At Snograt: I can't upgrade to newer drivers as they don't exist with both support for CUDA and Geforce 8. If the failing continues (and I can't find a fix) than I will upgrade my drivers and quit folding until things come out of beta.

3) At Rahja - I was joking about sponsorship. Also Tom's Hardware seem to think a GTX280 is 7.25 as fast at folding than a PS3 - if you get your hands on one than start folding .

4) At Dark Kal - My bad on the driver edition - I checked on Dxdiagnostics and I do have 174.55 already. The 174.35 was a bad typo

Edit (Concerning Rahja) :I double checked and 174.55 is the latest drivers that support CUDA and Geforce 8. As far as I see 175.16 and 175.19 (both WHQL'ed) do not support CUDA. The 177.35 support CUDA but not Geforce 8.

No problem, just trying to help. You could try installing the 175.16 Nvidia drivers, then using a program like revo uninstaller to uninstall those drivers completely (especially registry entries), rebooting and reinstalling the 174.55 Nvidia drivers. Could be something is conflicting. Otherwise I'm afraid your stuck with waiting for new drivers that both fix your problem and have CUDA support.

any news or fixes for this? I'm having the exact same problem.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_get.html

CUDA 2.0 BETA2
CUDA driver (BETA): NVIDIA Driver for Microsoft Windows Vista with CUDA Support (177.35). Includes driver support for 8 series and higher GPUs.