OK, this is an odd one. Possibly someone will have also seen this and can confirm or deny my results.

I have spent several days helping a friend revamp his gaming room with some new and/or updated computers for lan play. We play a number of games, including the Battlefield series, UT2004, original UT, and Red Faction. A couple of the machines were getting somewhat long in the tooth, so some new machines we ordered and we installed the first one before christmas. We also put a new graphics card in the game server, to replace the old one whose fan had failed.

So, there is a collection of disparate machines, none really ultra-high-end, but mostly fairly reasonable and capable of running all the games quite happily. They're all running windows 2000, which has never caused any problems beyond those inherent in any microsoft product.

The newest machine is a 3GHz P4 with 1GB of ram, a biggish SATA HD, and an Nvidia 8500GT card in it. It was bought as a complete system unit for a decent price, and just had the nvidia card stuck in to replace the original crappy onboard vga system. Vista was installed as standard, but lasted about 5 minutes before 2000 was installed. All the appropriate games, patches, system updates, etc were installed, (which took HOURS) and the end result was a cheap but fast games box. All well and good.

Unfortunately, fairly quickly we discovered that Battlefield 2, specifically, seemed to have major texturing faults. Tears, missing textures, black tiles, etc. Swapping graphics cards around, reinstalling the game, copying a known-good game directory from another machine, new drivers, nothing fixed it. Then, after a while, we discovered that many of the other games were suffering from similar but more subtle problems. That's case one.

Case two. The file server/games box with the new nvidia 7300gt graphics card began to have a similar but slightly different texturing bug, apparently only in UT2004. Putting the original graphics card back in (which had worked fine previously, just very noisily due to the bad fan) had no effect except a rise in background noise.

Case three. An old Shuttle SK43G machine, which had been sitting unnoticed in a cupboard for about two years, was happened upon and pressed into service. With a much faster graphics card recovered from one of the decommissioned old games boxed fitted, and many, MANY system and drivers updates, it proved to be quite fast and up to playing many of the games perfectly well. In fact, it already had the Battlefield 1942 series installed on it from the last time it had been used, which as I recall worked fine although rather slowly. However, it now, oddly enough, seemed to be suffering from textureing problems Similar to the other two machines, but again, not quite identical.

I spent three days mucking around with these damn machines. I uninstalled absolutely everything, drivers, games, antivirus software, everything I could think of. I swapped around memory, graphics cards, power suppliers, and so on, putting in known good ones whereever possible. I reinstalled older drivers, which were known to be functional. I downloaded new copies of the drivers and tried those. I reinstalled directx. I copied the game installations from a know working system onto each of the problematic systems. Nothing worked.

Finally, I shovelled all the remaining useful bits into one case, ending up with an ancient QDI motherboard with a 1.4GHz Athlon, 1.25GB sdram, an nvidia 5900 AGP card, and 60GB of HD in two drives. Crucially, I DID NOT install any of the new system upgrades, drivers, etc, to the OS leaving it as it was the last time it was updated nearly a year ago. I installed UT2004 on it. It worked perfectly (and suprisingly fast). I then deleted the game directory, and copied the one from the original problem machine, the new one, across to it. It also worked perfectly.

A microsoft update was performed. Still worked. All the antivirus stuff was updated. Still ok. DirectX was updated with the very latest version compatible with Windows 2000. Still fine.

Ultimately, the only software difference between the new machine and this old one is that the new one is running the 94.24 drivers (the latest one) and the old machine is running the 93.71 drivers (the previous one).

I have come to the conclusion that the 94.24 nvidia drivers don't work properly on windows 2000. All the other machines with problems have at one time or another over the last week had this version installed on them. The working machines (my personal games box, another high-end shuttle, and this really old collection of scrap) have the 93.71 drivers, and work perfectly.

Even odder, my games box had a dual-boot installation of XP and 2000, for running the two games I currently have that simply will not work on 2000 due to a requirement for directX 10, and the XP installation IS running 94.24. It works perfectly under XP.

Do you think it's possible that Nvidia could release a set of windows 2000/XP drivers that just don't work properly under 2000? If that's not the problem, what is?

One further thing I will try soon is to reinstall the new machine from scratch, but install the older nvidia drivers instead and see if it works, but I can't do that for a couple of weeks due to people going on holiday. That will prove it one way or the other, I guess.

pca

Yes, yes yes, a thousand times yes. That sort of thing happens *all the time*.

Every single time I download a new set of Nvidia drivers, I actually name the folder they're stored in with how long I'd successfully run them and what games ran successfully under them. So that way if I run into problems (and I frequently do), then I can easily roll back to the driver that works correctly with the game I want.

A quick Google on Nvidia's forums turns up lots of noise on version 94.24 - no doubt similar for other versions mind you.

The situation is even worse for laptop owners. My friend has an older Dell laptop, marketed as a gaming machine. It still has a decent 6800 Go card in it, but he has yet to find a driver version that allows him to play all the games he wants now. Dell stopped releasing drivers for it a while back, so he has to resort to "hacked" INF tricks to try and get drivers to even function. He got so frustrated over the situation that he stopped using the system for a while.

I really wish ATI was providing better competition to NVidia these days. While everyone always thought of ATI drivers as crappy, I've generally had little problems with them, and have probably seen more NVidia driver issues now with systems at work then I ever saw with ATI.

Of course, their split attention between XP and Vista probably isn't helping. I really have to wonder if PC gaming is really worth it at times these days. It's almost getting back to the dark days of DOS with having to worry about exact driver versions and DirectX updates not sent down via Microsoft Update. I think if more console games go the route of UT3 for the PS3 and allow a keyboard and mouse, more and more gamers may jump ship to the consoles.

Yeah, but ATI has its problems, too, with laptops... The one I've got, when you punch in its model number at that ATI web site, it says "You need to get the drivers from the laptop manufacturer". And HP didn't have any new drivers posted.

Of course, an update to the latest Catalyst drivers would fix a specific problem I was having, but the installer specifically doesn't allow it.

So I found a utility that someone published that hacks the intstaller and lets me install the Catalyst drivers onto the laptop, and sure enough it fixed my problem. Drivers work fine, better than the ones from HP. Why the heck would they prevent that?

http://www.ati.com/online/mobilecatalyst

Thats a direct download to the newest Mobility Catalyst drivers for XP 32 bit, updated monthly. I've had it bookmarked for a while, and it's still working post AMD merger.

Laptops in general have worse support on drivers, but at least ATI seems to maintain a mobility driver you can get to with a bit of digging, and continues to support older cards. On the NVidia side, similar hacks to the installer doesn't mean it will work, as they may have just yanked support completely for the card with no notice.

Huh? DirectX 10 is Vista only. I thought 2K and XP could both run DirectX 9.(whatever is the latest 9 release)

Presumably HP got a special price on the card by agreeing to do all its own support for driver updates etc ?

Thanks for that link, Tom, that's very useful!

Mobility Modder will modify the driver to work with unsupported notebooks. I used it to install the latest drivers on my MBP running Vista.

Yup, that's the utility I mentioned earlier in the thread, I just couldn't remember its name.

Yep. Microsoft hasn't supported Windows 2000 since June 2005, so why do you think nVidia would make more than a token effort?

Although it's got a degree of self-selection about it, Valve's latest survey shows that less than 1% of Windows gamers are still using Windows 2000, which doesn't exactly make continued driver support for Windows 2000 that compelling.

Now if only I could persuade the powers-that-be at my place to drop Windows 2000 support for our products

I'm convinced that constantly upgrading nVidia drivers for older video cards simply doesn't matter. I have been using a GeForce2 GTS for 6+ years. They stopped making drivers for it in the 70-series. However, the games I care about preform the same with drivers from 70, 60, and 50-series. Heck, those games performed better under Windows 98 using 20-series drivers.

Of course, your newer cards playing newer games may be more effected. The above is just an interesting data point.

Exactly. They keep updating the drivers to support new games, and they don't go back and optimize for the older games.

Feel lucky that the drivers still work with the older games. Often, they fix one thing in drivers and break 3 other things. I once tested a video driver (for a TI 340 based card) that somehow allowed the boot sector to be scribbled on. I used to call that version the "Boot Sector Creative Crayon" version.

Ross