Awesomeness

Write me up a paragraph for what you need, and I'll make a post on the homepage too.

Yep, will send it off to you sometime this evening, but for now, off to werk and skool.

Sounds good. Have a good one.

Installed these finally earlier today. I did some benchmarking, and so far these seem to be slightly slower than previous 186 and 185 series drivers. TrackMania got 1-3fps less in the benchmark run, Far Cry 2 got ~2 fps less (I do 3 runs of the Ranch Small, these got 31.47 fps average, and other drivers got between 33.01-33.77 fps average). Also, the graph shows a larger variation in framerate, with more peaks and valleys with these drivers than 185's and 186's.

I just updated Company of Heroes, and the "Low" result was really low -- in the single digits every time I ran it! Definitely lower than normal. I ran the benchmark multiple times and it was like this every time. It was noticeably more jumpy, too. I'll also run 3DMark06 and Vantage if you want me to.

Driver quality-wise, I didn't see any anomalies, artifacts, or problems. I didn't do a back-to-back IQ comparison, but what I DID see seemed up to par with other drivers (was nice and sharp, good color, good lighting, etc). There were no driver crashes or anything during testing.

Temps seem up around the board -- up by about 10% on average! Also, the driver does not downclock in 2D -- it runs at full speed all the time.

So, in general, I am not a fan of these drivers. Hotter temps, jumpier gaming, less average and low fps with greater dips in framerate, etc... Maybe it's just my computer?

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OK, I know exactly why the temps are the way they are, Ganzonomy noticed similar high temperatures and I fixed it for him, but I wanted to make sure it wasn't an isolated incident.

That has been and will be fixed in the final version of the driver.

It could possibly be the driver that's performing worse, or it could be your comp, I've gotten nice framerates on my laptop and solid performance overall, so it is possible it could be an isolated incident, but can't be sure for the time being.

These drivers messed up my powermizer even after uninstall and going back to previous drivers. Before I have gone from 179.67, 179.68 and 182.67 as I have a Go 7900 GS didn't fix it. I use driver cleaner and ccleaner. If I enable it now, it downclocks too much to 2d performance instead of 3d low which causes lag in Aero. It will then jump to 3d high but if the lowest it can go is 3d low there wont be a need for that.

If you used Driver Cleaner between installs, then it's likely not a driver problem at this point (if you removed my driver and went with a different one, using Driver Cleaner in between) and you should look elsewhere (possibly a Windows setting that got changed, look in the Windows Mobility Center as well as Windows power management settings to verify).

Nonetheless, as I stated above, an issue with the PowerMizer settings was identified and fixed for the final release, so that won't be an issue once I (hopefully) put the final versions up this weekend.

O i cant even install the 179s anymore, can only install this, the original 97.46 (lol) and 182.67. Everything else just gives the system has not been modified and trying to install it through device manager dont work either. I went through the registry myself and deleted all the nvidia stuff too. Think I need to format.


Edit: trying to install through device manager says "there is no driver selected for the device information set or element".

Tony, I have a very big update:

I noticed something while using my computer last night -- the "System" process was constantly using between 30-50% of my CPU even while idle! After much digging and trying to figure it out (including running multiple anti-virus and anti-malware apps, multiple restarts, shutting down processes, turning things like indexing on/off, etc), I believe it has to do with something Windows Update installed earlier this week. After trying everything to alleviate the CPU usage, I gave up and left the laptop on all night seeding a couple Torrents. I awoke, restarted the computer, and noticed the "System" process was now back to normal.

I am not sure what it was doing/updating, but I believe this is what made my testing results so bad, and re-ran the benchmarks, and got MUCH more positive results! Although the minimums were much better, they were still lower than normal. The maximum FPS gained a lot, (especially with CoH) and the averages were higher on all but Far Cry 2 (where the averages were up only about 0.5 fps, but the mins were up 3 fps over my FUBAR'ed previous benchies). Average FPS in Trackmania were actually up a few frames over previous drivers.

So, these are better than I initially thought. Though they still don't seem to be quite as smooth as 185's and 186's. But the results are MUCH more positive this time around.

Sorry about the confusion!


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UPDATE #2: The temperature problem reared its ugly head today! I was playing Demigod with my buddy, and my temps were INSANE (95 degrees)!!! To the point it made my computer hard lockup. Ouch...

In comparison to the 179.67 driver that Windows 7 RC suggested for my computer when I installed it, this driver yields a slightly lower 3DMark06 score (843 down from 868) on my Asus Z71V (2.26 Ghz Pentium M, Nvidia 6600).

Another update: For some reason, my screen won't go to sleep, regardless of settings. It just stays on all the time. It doesn't dim automatically either. Sounds to me like Powermizer is just plain messed up in these drivers!

Which will be fixed in the final version :P

Yeah, I figured -- but I was just pointing out anything and everything I come across, in case it was something else that had to be fixed. Thus "beta testing", LOL!

I also noticed that I couldn't enable fixed aspect-ratio scaling in this driver