New Nvidia drivers for FFXI.

[tymora]

Vista SP1 didn't break anything. Everything is working better or at least not worse as it should, unless you are one of those unlucky folks who has the update crash halfway.

Soundblaster X-Fi users need to upgrade to latest drivers before patching to SP1 and may need to tweak a bit to get rid of a "no sound on video playback" issue.

Turn off virus scans before updates. They can do wonders to the stability of your system during such a big update.

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Nvidia has more issues with Vista than ATI, especially with 8000+ series and especially with SLI, that are not resolved completely yet after 1 year.

FPS: In crowded areas such as DA where there are up to 100+ ppl, my FPS drops to about 10-11. Same can be said in whitegate I get around 10-11FPS. Doing small manned events, I get the 29 FPS like I should be.

However, i will tell you that I am running windows vista. I had windows XP running on a laptop with slightly worse specs than the ones I listed above and I almost always had 29 FPS and I saw HNMs like Fafhogg pop yellow longer than I do currently with Vista. The game performance between vista/xp is huge. I can't even dual box anymore with Vista, but on windows XP I could do it with no problem or lag.

Things to ask yourself:
Are the game settings identical? Vista tends to have more stuff running in the background slowing everything down. The bottleneck may not be your graphics card. Are you running a lot of background programs? Laptops have a annoyingly bad habit to run a lot of programs.

Do you have the power savings feature set to Performance?

What brand is your laptop? Some vendors have more problems than others.

How big is your page file? And where is it located?

Do you have DreamScene installed? Nvidia's release notes stated that their drivers have issues with it.

How long do you have Vista running? This affects SuperFetch. If you disabled it with 3GB RAM, then it is kind of silly. Program startup times will be slow initially but will pick up after you run Vista for a couple of weeks.

Vista has known issues with Nvidia's SLI. Using SLI on Vista may perform worse than using a single card. This is in the Nvidia driver readme.

Are the drivers for all your components working well? In particular, your sound card? A hiccup in any part of the system can cause everything to crawl. Creative's support for Vista ain't too great.

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By comparison, XP has been around so much longer and has more stable drivers for everything.

Why does Vista suck in this respect? They changed the driver architecture in Windows and some vendors apparently have a lot of issues with the new system. Microsoft should have done a better job with the driver testing and vendor education. Well and Vista can be a resource gulper.

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Well, update to SP1 to see if it helps.

[shaddix]

i just installed 169.25s and framerate went to shit lol -.-; back to the .17s

[Plexiglas]

For anyone with a Dell laptop with a 8400 or 8600 in it - Dell just released (3/18) 174.31s and they give me the framerates I expect to have on my Inspiron 1520 under Vista SP1.
Time to blow away my XP partition!

[Kurgan]

For anyone with a Dell laptop with a 8400 or 8600 in it - Dell just released (3/18) 174.31s and they give me the framerates I expect to have on my Inspiron 1520 under Vista SP1.
Time to blow away my XP partition!

Nice. My new Dell laptop has an 8600M GS in it and came with Vista. I may give Vista another shot on it.

Edit: Interesting. Dell hasn't posted this driver under the XPS 1530 downloads yet. I'll have to try the one from the Inspiron 1520 anyway when I get home.

[Izzy]

Here's a link to the 174.31 drivers @ lv2g.com

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/ind ... opic=17737

Now everyone can enjoy them!

[Fadian]

Hey guys I need a little help. Let me explain the situation.

I had to reinstall everything on my laptop that has vista. prior i was able to get this driver to work and it worked great! but now that I reinstall everything I can get into the game normally without a problem but not with windower, I keep crashing when trying to get into the game after the Play button. Is there anything or anyone who's experienced this problem. My Ini files are the way it was. it is the lastest version but could it be because of the driver? I downloaded and updated the display one from laptop2go.com website to the latest. with the modded file in it so I could get it to work on laptop. Thanks all.

[Kilik]

Sounds like you need the new version of Recast. Old versions of it crash the game at the time you are saying.

[Fadian]

Sounds like you need the new version of Recast. Old versions of it crash the game at the time you are saying.

What does Recast have to do with my problem? It's a windower problem. plus recast .dll file has been deleted. I don't use windower recast.

[Demosthenes11]

Dl'd service pack 1 and using the new drivers dell just came out with for 8400M
no noticable improvement over 169.17

[Kilik]

Sounds like you need the new version of Recast. Old versions of it crash the game at the time you are saying.

What does Recast have to do with my problem? It's a windower problem. plus recast .dll file has been deleted. I don't use windower recast.

Nevermind then. The game crashes at the exact time you are saying if an old version of recast is being used. Happened to a bunch of people in my ls when the first dll was broken and actually became a running joke.

[terranova]

158.22
8800GTX 768.
Playing crapblivion brought problems of it's own and I had download like every driver in the galaxy(VRAM bug).

Anyway thats my driver and I play FFXI on max settings. Theres still molasses loading in besieged and Rolenberry fields entrance but thats normal.

[Fadian]

Good news. Found out the problem. It was my DirectX version. not sure why but when I reinstalled Version 10 with directx 3d. It suddenly worked.

[Francisco II]

I tried out the new drivers, and haven't really noticed much difference...

However, I continue to have this problem... it's been happening as long as I can remember.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...82x/glitch.jpg

Those banners, certain blocks of buildings, certain shades on the ground, some equipment textures will flicker horribly.

Also, moving closer to, away from and even panning the camera can cause certain map elements to disappear...

Has anyone else had this problem, and is there a fix?

[Francisco II]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...82x/bander.jpg

That happens too... (same distance from the Bandersnatch and I, the only thing that changed was a slight rotation of the camera, and the Bandersnatch vanished off screen. It should still be visible.)

GeForce 7300 GT... a friend of mine said they also had the exact same problem with the 7x00 series...

[alienmonkey]

Anyone know why the following might be happening? Everything becomes invisible and can only target myself. Can't even target the auction house. Even though everyone is non targetable and invisible, I can see their casting/crafting animations as well as chats.
http://img258.imageshack.us/img258/1861/032708nc7.jpg
I seem to be having this issue with every nvidia video card I've had if I've used new drivers. I recently got a 9600GT, but with my old 8600GTS I had to use 101.x drivers in order to not get it to do this. I don't remember having this issue with my 7x/6x series card if i recall. I can't remember the exact series model.

[shaddix]

that's some weird shit

on a happy note, 174.74 is working with ffxi well, finally off those damned 169.17s @_@b

[Ayato]

Anyone know why the following might be happening? Everything becomes invisible and can only target myself. Can't even target the auction house. Even though everyone is non targetable and invisible, I can see their casting/crafting animations as well as chats.
http://img258.imageshack.us/img258/1861/032708nc7.jpg
I seem to be having this issue with every nvidia video card I've had if I've used new drivers. I recently got a 9600GT, but with my old 8600GTS I had to use 101.x drivers in order to not get it to do this. I don't remember having this issue with my 7x/6x series card if i recall. I can't remember the exact series model.

I seem to have the same problem, only started happening after i updated the drivers though :\

[algrensan]

i got a gateway p-6831fx w/ windows vista 32-bit & nvidia geforce 8800m gts recently and the 169.17 driver from laptopvideo2go definitely helped with the fps from day 1. everything looks fine but when i open up a second windower, there's some graphics glitching on the previous window-like models flashing/blinking. does anyone else have this problem?

[Izzy]

i got a gateway p-6831fx w/ windows vista 32-bit & nvidia geforce 8800m gts recently and the 169.17 driver from laptopvideo2go definitely helped with the fps from day 1. everything looks fine but when i open up a second windower, there's some graphics glitching on the previous window-like models flashing/blinking. does anyone else have this problem?

That's a problem in 169.17. You have to get the newest 174.whatever driver

[Mrdude]

I'll start off by saying I am horrible with computers, and I am pretty much retarded when it comes to some of this stuff. I have a HP pavilion laptop, which I bought this year. It has windows vista on it, the graphics card is Nvidia Geforce 7150(I know there is more onto the end of this, but I'm not sure where to find it).

I downloaded this: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/ind ... opic=16428 driver, extracted it and then put the modded inf file into the folder, replaced it etc. When I run setup, it will run fine until about half way through, which is when it comes up and says "Windows cannot find the publisher of this program" I continue. It seems to stick at 50%, and after a couple mins it crashes my laptop and I have to restore it to before I can even get onto my laptop anymore. I have tried it twice now, and the same thing happens both times. Does anyone know what this could be and/or how I could make it work?