NVIDIA Drivers Woes

Once upon a time NVIDIA was the de facto graphics platform; their Unified Driver Architecture made installing drivers a breeze. Now, their drivers have created many woes for many people, with their drivers not being well written and riddled with bugs. It is so bad that if something is broken, the actual solution is to actually downgrade the drivers, which is most certainly the opposite of what the solution should be.

I bring this up because I have been playing around with my NVIDIA drivers for the past month, trying to find one that works across the board without having a driver that is too old for my liking. My system is an nForce 2 motherboard with an AMD Athlon XP processor and an eVGA GeForce 6200 (AGP) graphics card. I have found that using any ForceWare (NVIDIA’s graphics drivers) version 9x.xx will cause any MPEG-4 video to either freeze the computer or blue screen.

Now, all the drivers less than version 90.00 work fine for everything so far, except for some DirectX 8.1 compatibility issues I’ve been having with Command & Conquer Generals. NVIDIA needs to put some serious work into its drivers.

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