something wrong with my 8800gts

hey everyone, my first post here.

i have a problem with my XFX8800GTS 640MB GPU.

ever since i installed the new nvidia drivers (178) fro October some of the my games started working weird. i installed the older version (175.19) and at first it seemed to correct the problem, in games such as CoD4 and Crysis Warhead. anyway, now no matter what version of the driver i use everything seems to work seriously slow and crapy.

if anyone knows or has such a problem please help me out.

thanks in advance.

The likes of the 178+, or even 175+, drivers, are not ~particularly~ aimed at dev for cards in the 8 series. Sure they'll work, mostly down the "support" line, in so much as they'll work but they aren't going to massively increase performance in any way.

Generally those drivers will be of ~some~ benefit to 9 series users, but will be more emphasizing GT200 users. As will the 180+ releases, lesser so the 9 series with these perhaps. All along they will still "support" the 8 series as they do the 7 series etc.

As I know the big push for the newest drivers are going to be the desire to use physx maybe, it would be a good idea to find a physx set of nvidia drivers that work and stick with them as a base. When new drivers come out, try them, if they crap ur system, revert to the base ones.

174++ are the drivers to stick to tho, cos there was a god-awful bunch of mistakes made in the 169 sets that gave lots of ctd to alot of peoples cards - particularly temperamental to performance or oc setups.

To be sure the current drivers u have are fully installed properly, u can open the nVidia control panel, and in the bottom left corner will be a link that says "system information". If u click on it a window will open - if u then click on the "component" tab, it'll list all the versions of the driver-files installed on ur pc. If u have Driverset 178.13, it should read 7.15.11.78.13 on all of them, possibly with the exception of the control-panel drivers (they dont matter as much, theyre seperate). If some of the files are different values, then u have mixed driver files, which means u need to uninstall them and remove the files (with DriverCleanerPro or similar) b4 reinstalling the ones u want.

wow man, thanks so much, i'll try to uninstall all the drivers and only install the 175.19 cuz they seem to have worked the best for me, and i'm pretty sure (from what i understood of your post) that i have mixed driver files, and that would explain a lot!

* Uninstall the current Forceware driver via the Control panel.

* Reboot into "Safe" mode (F8).

* Run Driver Sweeper and choose the "NVIDIA - Display" filter.

* Press "Clean" and wait for it to finish.

* Reboot (normally).

* Cancel any hardware wizards that may appear.

* Install the desired Forceware Driver.

* Reboot.

most also update sound drivers that the other area COD5 has had same issuies fixed them by following that order. you can find it on Guru 3d com

I agree with previous recommendations :

1. Uninstall driver

2. Clean the registry (with any reg cleaner apps you prefer)

3. re-install driver

if the same problem occur, you might have mixed up the driver & registry (and anything else) badly

last resort..

4. format system drive & reinstall windows & all.. (same config as it runs ok) <-- works all the time