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Clive Webster
Bless me reader, for I have sinned. It’s been two months since my last blog…
And not being catholic I have no idea how the rest of a Confession is meant to go; this is pretty much all Hollywood has let me see of the fascinating ritual. That and the Hail Marys (nope, no idea what they are either) and perhaps some farcical mix up where someone’s pushed into the booth and has to recommend an appropriate course of action to a bewildered worshipper.
Anyway, onto the blog, which is all about a new screen I recently bought. Yes, bought. With my own actual money what I had earned. Now that Issue 50’s out I can say what it is (the ViewSonic on the Elite list) and the problems I faced with my idiot graphics card. Or, rather, the idiot driver for that graphics card.
I was using a GeForce 7900 GT and got myself the latest ForceWare 162.18 graphics driver as I used the excuse of a new screen to reinstall XP (for some reason I hadn’t updated the driver yet). Reinstall complete I had a desktop that measured something like 1,720 x 1,050 pixels rather than the 1,680 x 1,050 that my lovely new 22in TFT should have. I had to scroll across the desktop to see the clock!
Frustrated, I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the driver, tinkering with the custom resolutions to force it to do the right resolution (which requires a test before finalising, which it failed every time) and all manner of other shenanigans to get the card to display the right resolution. Suitably irritated I went on the web to see if anyone had a solution - turns out this ‘over-large resolution’ problem is an issue with the162.18 driver and 7-series cards trying to do 1,680 x 1,050. Well done Nvidia; it’s not like that’s even a particularly obscure resolution.
The next step was to hunt out a previous release (I’d stupidly deleted all the previous driver downloads when reformatting my hard disk). Nvidia provides for this and I was about to tell you how to find it with a link, but I can’t remember how on Earth I found them and the site is less than helpful at pointing you toward it.
However, I fluked the driver version search tool the other week when I was trying to fix this problem and downloaded a previous driver. Or at least 50-oddMB of corrupted file. It just wouldn’t install at all, even when I went back through my browser history (anything rather than try to find the driver version search tool again) and downloaded another copy. Still broken. Gah!
As a last resort I tried the BETA drivers that Nvidia helpfully provides. This did solve the resolution problem, but now I had flickering shadows in Medieval II: Total War and other graphical glitches that were horribly distracting.
This was the final excuse to ditch the now struggling GeForce 7900 GT in favour of an 8800 GTS 320MB (Nvidia again, will I never learn?). This is not only much faster, but also much quiter - my PC now hums quite pleasantly rather than whirs annoyingly (I had never got around to replacing the standard cooler).
As an aside, I’d really hoped the ForceWare 162.18 was the start of stable drivers from Nvidia. It’s the first release (I think) in ages to be unified - to be applicable to every GeForce card and not just this series or that family. And it’s also a good bit smaller than recent releases. This should be a sign that the Nvidian driver guys are really getting to grips with the 8-series and driver writing in general, and that we’ll have super-stable graphics drivers for the foreseeable future (or at least until the 9-series is released, which definitely won’t be in November). However, it’s a botched job, so no such luck. Now that I’ve got a stable driver for my new card I won’t be deleting the install file anytime soon just in case an ‘update’ breaks things it shouldn’t.
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