GeForce 6800 + 64bit Vista

Anybody know the state of 64bit drivers for this card? I know there are drivers that 'work', but that last I'd hear (maybe a year and a half ago) was that they weren't 'optimized' yet, and gaming performance would suffer.

I'm getting Vista later this week (free copy for attending a microsoft conference) and I need to know whether I can get the 64bit edition or not. Most everything else on my system as least has 64bit drivers available, I just need to know if this graphics driver is any good.

The drivers listed currently are the ForceWare 169.25 dated December 07 for Vista 64. I used these same drivers on 64bit vista with a 7950GT up until a few months ago when that box was upgraded to the 8800 series. It worked fine, didn't really see any significant performance drops compared to 32bit vista.

But honestly, how much longer is a 6800 series going to last for a gamer anyway. I'm sure at some point soon you'll find yourself in a position to upgrade to a more modern card that is really designed for vista and DX10, and allow you to get the most out of your new OS.

If your not much for gaming (or have another pc you prefer to game with) then the drivers are at least in a state where they won't be causing any hassles, the release notes dont really state any critical problems.

You'd think that, wouldn't you? But we already have a negative monthly cash-flow situation and we have a baby on the way, so I'll be on this card at least until next year's tax return, at a minimum

I am a gamer, but 90%+ of my game time is in counter-strike source, and my 6800 is good enough for that.

So it turned out to be moot: they downgraded our Windows Server license to a one-year evaluation, and gave us the full version of Vista Ultimate 32-bit instead.

So I installed Vista just to check it out, since the last time I tried it was still in beta. It's only been a day, but so far I haven't seen any of the wtf's people were complaining about at launch. I wouldn't tell anyone to go out and upgrade, but I wouldn't tell anyone who's getting a new computer anyway to avoid Vista any more, either. Actually, I wouldn't say anything right now. I need to give it another couple of weeks first.

For a day to day machine, I havnt had anyone complain about vista. It is just the special cases that I have had trouble with, either hardcore gamers who pack their pc full of goodies or people who are trying to rely on older hardware with this new operating system. I was quite pissed to see at launch that no ATI AIW cards were supported at all, and even now none of the tuners are supported, only VIVO.

So if you have modern enough hardware Vista is fine, but older stuff is a pain to deal with, and if you have special needs of any kind, vista can be a pain to deal with.

Personally I have not upgraded to vista yet, but I will run it on my review testbed, and I will eventually upgrade my gaming system to vista64. The drivers for modern hardware are ramping up pretty quick, so now probably would be the best time for people to upgrade too vista, or just after SP1 is released.

And in my previous post, I wasn't implying that the 6800 wasn't a good card, I was merely pointing out that Nvidia has very little reason to dedicate a full team of guys to fixing drivers for a 6800 series card. If you find any show stopper bugs with the 6800 and vista, your best bet is likely to replace the card...hell I'd even send ya a 7900 if ya want But like you said, if the 6800 runs all the games you intend to play perfectly fine and you have no issues with vista and the 6800, there is no need to upgrade

But be sure to share your experiences with vista, it's always nice to know what problems/solutions people have with vista, it helps all of us have a point of reference to help others

I figure by next April I should be able to find a Radeon 3850 for ~$100. Hopefully by then we'll be able to find some money for an upgrade- maybe even update to a dual core processor, but I'm not that optimistic.

I am keeping a log of my experience, and intentionally doing some things I don't normally do often. The biggest things I've learned so far game-wise are:
1) Always install games by right clicking and choosing "Run as administrator".
2) So far games performance seems nearly identical to XP, in spite of the rumors of significant frame rate declines. It also looks like Vista is sharing some of my system memory with the graphics card to help with games performance, but I can't confirm that yet and maybe it's just offsetting the aforementioned decline.

So here's where I'm at: I had 2 or 3 days of normal, XP-like gaming, and all of a sudden performance tanked. And I mean tanked: framerate on CS:Source would sometimes be in the single digits, which isn't even playable.

So it's a new install- I'm still adding my software and I figure I just must have installed something that was killing performance. Indeed, it turns out that when I installed Visual Studio, SQL Express edition tagged along for the ride. So yeah: SQL Server running in the background could do that. But even after removing SQL Server I was still having problems (maybe a minimum fps of 12, instead of 8 or 9). I tried the usual things-- cleaning out anything I don't absolutely need-- but it didn't really help. I set my usb flash drive to enable readyboost-- no help.

Finally, I found a forum post that said to check whether the nvidia driver were optimized for dual-displays, and turn that off if so. At last, I see a noticeable improvement. Now my minimum fps is closer to 26, with even that low being rare. But it's still much worse than it was before, and if there are a lot of people in a map it's much more likely to stay near the low end.

This is good enough to be smooth, but I know it's dropping shots when I fire, and it's nowhere near where it was before. I was prepared for a 15% drop or so, but 85% of my old minimum (50-60, with >80 being the norm) is still above 40. This is more like a 35-45% reduction, and that's not cool. More than that, I have nearly all the eye-candy turned off. I don't remember my old settings exactly, but I know I had some higher-quality settings enabled.

I'm considering starting over again with a fresh install, but I just about have things the way I want them enough that I'd prefer not to. Any suggestions appreciated, but this is an old thread so I'm mostly writing just to rant. I'm still kinda hoping there's another silly setting with my graphics driver I can change to fix this.

I'm beginning to believe the problem is that nVidia hasn't invested the time to properly tune the driver to perform well for their older cards. My hypothesis is they assume that few people, gamers especially, will be upgrading an older system to Vista. It's probably not a bad assumption on their part, and I'm the exception here. So it's just not worth the effort to them.

Therefore I think my solution is to get a 'new' video card. As I've said, I'm very broke for the foreseeable future. But I've been trolling eBay and I'm seeing some acceptable cards like GeForce 7900's or HD2650's (maybe even an 8500) sell as low as the $25 range after shipping. I'll hang out there for a week or two and keep low-balling cards until I win one.

well best of luck too ya, but if you are having a lot of trouble I do have a 7900GT 256 and 7950GT 512 laying around that I would be willing to sell for a decent price. But I would also draw your attention here on newegg, x1950xtx for $118 shipped. Price is prolly more than you wanted to spend, but odds are you could get $50 easy for that 6800. X1900 series drives for vista are much stronger (the x1000 family in general is quite vista strong) and performance wise the x1950xtx is gunna crush everything you'll find in this price range. 9600GT would be a bit faster, but your looking at $150 typically.

The HD2600, HD3650, and 8500GT would be fine for CSS, but other games will become limited very quickly. The 7900s will run things very well though, when the 7900GT first came out I benchmarked it against 6800GS SLI and was surprised to see it pulled ahead by quite a bit in some games.

Best of luck too ya though, and keep us updated on your vista experience

I do have one question- if you could elaborate on the the performance characteristics of a HD2600/HD2650. I haven't looked into nearly as deeply as you have (who has? ), but the little I've read shows them to be very comparable to a 7950. Also, considering the trouble I've had with my current older nVidia I was thinking I might have better luck with an ATi, as I've google a few other posts of people having trouble with 6xxx and 7xxx running source on vista.

Aside from that, I'm kind of conflicted. One the one hand I'd like to push for a 8xxx+ or HD2xxx+ series card, since as long as I have Vista I'd kinda like to get something that supports DX10. But on the other hand any DX10 card I can afford right now isn't likely to play a DX10 game very well, unless it's a DX10 rendition of something cheesy like bejeweled, and then what's the point?

Add to that the fact that even if I do get a decent card that will play a good DX10 game, I know I'm still just going to run through it quick and then go back to counter strike source. I'd say about 95% or more of my gaming in in CSS. I don't expect that to change soon. I'm not pro level, but I'm very comfortable with the game: on any given pub I'm likely to score in the top 3 or 4 of 20, and sometimes I can just run over people. I play a lot of gungame, and if I can actually get my performance problem fixed I nearly always make it to nade level and expect to win about 1 map in 3 or 4.

Any other online game and I'd have to start again from the bottom learning maps and weapons, tricks, and strategies. Occasionally I'll pop in UT2004 (or the original), FarCry, or something else from the same era for a change, but never for very long. I'd like to give UT3 and Crysis a try. After I get my new card I may play a demo, but given I won't even spend the price of the game on a video card, don't look for me actually buy it any time soon.

So I guess in the end I don't really have a lot to gain from a DX10 card. It's more of a psychological benefit than a real benefit (not just in having DX10 capability, but also have a later-generation card, even if it doesn't perform any better). But that doesn't make it any easier to ignore- when it comes down to it people are more emotional than rational most of the time.