260.99 WHQL Posted

[fuzioninfinity]

Didn't see it posted up here so I figured I'd let you all know. I'm using them now and their working great, saw a significant framerate boost in New Vegas thanks to the SLi profiles, which is all i'm playing at the moment. It also fixed those random boxes I kept seeing in the desert. :P

However, I had to do a lot of coaxing to get surround working properly, took 3 reboots, and "easing" it in from disabled SLi, to maximize 3d performance, then activate all displays, and finally I enabled surround and it worked... I'm not sure if it was just luck of the draw or what I did made a difference, but before the NVCP would just go non responsive for long periods of time, then my screens would go blank and nothing would happen, and I would have to reboot. Once I got it working properly, the improvements in FA:NV were worth the effort. I recommend trying 'em out if your seeing any issues in it..

64-bit http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvista-64bit-260.99-whql-driver.html

32-bit http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvista-32bit-260.99-whql-driver.html

[Paradigm Shifter]

Your tale of "coaxing" doesn't encourage me to try 'em out... :(

I'm so following the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality for Surround... 8)

[g00seberry]

I'm on the only driver revision that actually works. All others do what you mentioned of becoming unresponsive. Interesting to hear that you coaxed it into working though. Maybe I'll try it when I have a spare 5 hours, am on drugs and have no sharp objects around.

[Paradigm Shifter]

I'm on the only driver revision that actually works.

258.96?

All others do what you mentioned of becoming unresponsive. Interesting to hear that you coaxed it into working though. Maybe I'll try it when I have a spare 5 hours, am on drugs and have no sharp objects around.

I had to read this twice. I think I cracked a rib laughing... :mrgreen:

[fuzioninfinity]

[quote]I'm on the only driver revision that actually works.

258.96?

All others do what you mentioned of becoming unresponsive. Interesting to hear that you coaxed it into working though. Maybe I'll try it when I have a spare 5 hours, am on drugs and have no sharp objects around.

I had to read this twice. I think I cracked a rib laughing... :mrgreen:

Lol, indeed I figured my story wouldn't be too encouraging. Probably not worth it if your not playing New Vegas at the moment, or having any issues in it. I've found myself checking frequently for new driver updates, desperately searching for any improved performance with my setup. It's all that gets me out of bed in the morning..

[r3v3nant]

Yep... same with me. I plan on staying on the 258.96s until I find a game that just doesn't work with them or have some other road block like that.. my system is so damn stable with these drivers I don't want to "poke the bear". ;)

edit: I wonder if fragments of drivers are being left behind from some of these and sweepers aren't even catching them? seems weird that so many people have issues going from 258.96 to anything newer..

[g00seberry]

Indeed, I'm on 258.96. All new drivers except for one (can't remember which) have resulted in black screens and NVCP hanging after selecting surround.

[BHawthorne]

IMHO NVIDIA needs to get their head screwed on straight when it comes to NVIDIA Surround. Frankly it's crap in current form. I've been highly irratated with it since it was released.

Why is it only 3 screen?
Why does it require multiple cards?
Why can't you individually color correct each screen?
Why have the drivers been so totally flaky this long? It's been at least 6 months now...

If NVIDIA Surround is their answer to AMD EyeFinity, NVIDIA are answering the wrong questions.

[Gilly]

IMHO NVIDIA needs to get their head screwed on straight when it comes to NVIDIA Surround. Frankly it's crap in current form. I've been highly irratated with it since it was released.

Why is it only 3 screen?
Why does it require multiple cards?
Why can't you individually color correct each screen?
Why have the drivers been so totally flaky this long? It's been at least 6 months now...

If NVIDIA Surround is their answer to AMD EyeFinity, NVIDIA are answering the wrong questions.

Eyefinity is still a PITA if you get unlucky with the DP > DVI adaptors. When did that come out?

Only 3 screen I don't know, but if you run 4 for example, not in portrait, you will have no crosshair (in the bezel of the middle 2).

I guess the multiple cards comes down to how many signals a single card can drive?

Does windows thing in control panel allow more than one monitor to have colour correction? If so I guess it would be a matter of making windows see the 3 monitors as 3 monitors, not 1 group.

And for the drivers, can't comment. Haven't read anything good about any Cat update either, for a very long time, my GF's 4650 apparently got hardware acceleration in VLC, all it does is crash the program after 4 seconds.

[fuzioninfinity]

I'm sure his question for the limitation to 3 screens is mostly referring to 5 screen setups, and dual projector setups. In comparison to Eyefinity, NV surround is much more limited as far as screen configuration goes. A number of people have been asking for dual projector support. As far as I know though, Eyefinity still can't do 5x portrait screens, can it?


Since I'm using 2x 295s, the one setup that is listed as "temporarily unsupported" (god knows how long temporary is)..I've been trying every single developer driver, beta driver and release driver NVidia had put out.. the 258.96 drivers are completely unusable for me - every DX10 game stutters and framerates are all around exceptionally low even in DX9.

The drivers seem to indeed be getting better gradually, and using the 261.00 developer drivers I'm finally beginning to see the performance I saw on the matrox box with the 197 drivers. The time its taking for NVIDIA to get their crap together is extremely disappointing though. It was only recently I've been able to move from the matrox box to NVIDIA surround, and even so it was a forced move, as one of my old monitors died and I decided to move up to 3 1920x1080 screens, which the Matrox box wont do.

I remember hearing promises from someone over on the NVIDIA forums that the 260.xx drivers would bring support to my configuration, but there hasn't been a single mention of support for 2x 295s once in any of the patch notes yet..


Besides, just because Eyefinity didn't reach perfection over night (and still hasn't) isn't an excuse for NVIDIA to slack off with their surround drivers. The fact that NVIDIA surround still doesn't have a built in desktop division is pathetic, the fact that I have to have my matrox box plugged into my tower so I can use matrox's desktop division software is pretty lame. I know some people somehow got it working without the matrox box present, but I haven't been able to.. It's still fulfilling it's role as a paper weight on my desk, and taking up one of my USB ports.

NVIDIA needs to step up their game. Surround feels like a neglected stepchild right now.

[BHawthorne]

Besides, just because Eyefinity didn't reach perfection over night (and still hasn't) isn't an excuse for NVIDIA to slack off with their surround drivers. The fact that NVIDIA surround still doesn't have a built in desktop division is pathetic, the fact that I have to have my matrox box plugged into my tower so I can use matrox's desktop division software is pretty lame. I know some people somehow got it working without the matrox box present, but I haven't been able to.. It's still fulfilling it's role as a paper weight on my desk, and taking up one of my USB ports.

NVIDIA needs to step up their game. Surround feels like a neglected stepchild right now.

I think the most apparent answer is that NVIDIA Surround was implemented to answer AMD EyeFinity, not to answer the needs of the general surround-screen gamer. It's been apparent to me since initially released that NVIDIA is less concerned with feedback from the consumers using it than merely being seen as having a competing feature. Frankly, NVIDIA doesn't understand most of our needs and really doesn't care to ask what they are either. I've experienced it first hand via NDA with NVIDIA. By just looking in this subforum vs the EyeFinity one you can tell which hardware developer has their act together as far as looking for customer input and seeking feedback to refine feature set. From what I understand NVIDIA staff have been invited to frequent WSGF for quite some time and have never been a public face here, nor have they attempted to publicly promote NVIDIA Surround in any form here. That to me is short sighted on their part and almost neglagent compared to Matrox and AMD's public face around WSGF. To me that all spells out that NVIDIA does not understand it's target audience, nor does it have current plans to do so.

I'm not just some random person spewing this as nonsense. I'm a long time NVIDIA user who was an EVGA forum moderator for 3+ years and I currently have a Tri-SLI GTX470 NVIDIA Surround setup I've been using since the very first leaked drivers were in the wild. I've worked with people on both sides of the fence, AMD and NVIDIA. AMD has been consistantly more accomodating and interested in feedback.