Beware the nVidia 169 series drivers

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I just can't quite believe this one. nVidia has a problem supporting dual-core processors in their 169 series drivers with several of the newer video cards. You get system freezes, video card crashes, suddenly blank screens, gui lockups, etc....

I've been experiencing this with my amd64 install and wondering where in the world all these crashes were coming from all of a sudden. I'd never experienced any before, and all of a sudden my browser started crashing and locking up my system so I'd have to hit the power button to reset the system. Other times it would crash but I could get in through ssh, kill the gui, restart it, and things would be fine until the next crash.

Well, last night, or should I say this morning at 3 a.m., I found out that a ton of other people with dual core processors running the same drivers I've been running are having the same exact problems. nVidia knows about it, and has known about for some time too. They just don't advertise that they're not supporting dual-core processors, but will tell you after you run into problems with one of their cards. They are not even saying if they plan on fixing this problem....

 

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Sorry to hear about that, freddie. I'm personally not having issues with them - but then again I'm runnig a P4 HT.

Was going to suggest the new 173 drivers but I understand those have similar issues.

 

No. Dual core cpu's is what they are having a problem with. It seems people with either an Intel or AMD dual core are having problems. It seems to be more prevalent with the Intel cpus than with the AMD but it affects both. It's also card specific. The problem only pops up with some nVidia cards. I just happen to have one of them: GEForce 8600GT.

As far as I know this is only in their Linux drivers, not their Windows drivers.

 

I would think its just linux as I am running 174 have dual core cpus and have never had an issue.

 

Well, as you can see, this is posted in the Linux forum....

 

yep

Linux doesn't seem that good for gaming although its good for other stuff.

 

Unix is good Liniux is stable like Unix, not sure what else Linux does though.

 

I used to use Sun SPARCstations when I was a student. When we talk about UNIX we are not just looking at an OS, we are looking at an entire hardware platform designed for performance computing. On the other hand, as far as I can see, Linux is a UNIX-like environment design to run on general purpose architectures with a focus on open source tools to add to your chosen free distribution.

I won't pretend to know about Linux as I'm just as n00b as anyone else, but this is what I have observed recently.

 

The following link shows the hardware architectures Debian supports. Debian has, by far, the widest range of hardware coverage of all the Linux distros. It also stays the closest of all the Linux distros to the original Unix structure. That's been a conscious decision by the Debian devs.

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/

 

Well I never knew that Linux (or more accurately, 'Debian') was targetting existing Unix architectures. Thanks for that!

 

im getting similar phenomenon on my Vista Ultimate x64 machine, using a 8800GTS card. Didnt think it was the graphics card, but i suppose it could be.

 

shouldn't you be on 175.16 by now, if you have an 8 series card.

169 was realeased last year sometime for vista and xp.

 

no idea what version of the drivers im running to be honest.

 

do a dxdiag, you should find what nforce driver you have on there if I remember correctly or you could visit nvidia download the newest one that came out on the 13th of may 175.16 and you will be up to date.

I have an 8600GT never had any issues with any drivers yet.

Just to add dxdiag will show your system info, graphics and wether you are running DX10 or 9, you are running Vista so it should say 10.

 

The 169.12 release is the version number of the latest official Linux driver from nVidia. The latest beta drivers released for Linux are the 173.08 release.

I think it's a mistake to assume equivalent numbers mean equivalent drivers as this version for Linux was released in February of this year.

 

I understand, I thought Fergal was talking about his Vista PC though.

 

He was, but you used the version number from the title of this thread in reference to Windows driver versions and told Fergal he shouldn't really be using this version number of the driver. It's sort of like comparing apples and oranges to me. But, maybe I just misunderstood your point.

 

All I was meaning was that if he updated to the newer driver then hopefully it will sort out the issues he is having.

I am paranoid about having up to date versions of drivers etc, so I regularly check the manufacturers web-sites read the release nots and download the latest versions.