Nvidia 8800 problems

Apparently the GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS graphics cards, currently being touted as a minimum requirement for running the next generation of video games coming out at the end of the year (CoD4 included), have software bugs.

The full story is reported in the following artices:


1. The Inquirer.Net

IT SEEMS THAT Nvidia's Geforce 8800 series of graphics cards suffers random slowdowns, and this can be particularly problematic for owners of the Geforce 8800GTS 320MB, the cheapest 8800 out there.

The problem lies in fact that the G80 GPU has some trouble with texture memory management. In many unrelated cases, this bug starts leaving textures in video memory and system memory, causing the board to run out of texture memory. Once you run out of memory for textures on your graphics card and system, you will experience a lot of swapping with textures on a hard drive, and that is recipe for disaster, at least as far as framerates are concerned.

Follow up article

AFTER OUR ORIGINAL story, we managed to get an update from an Nvidia rep regarding the actual timeframe of the driver release that will fix the 8800 slowdown issue.

As it stands right now, fix for this highly annoying bug is planned for a release between the end of August and middle of September. My personal assumption would be that the latter date is a more realistic one. Nvidia stated that this problem is "of complex nature," and it seems to us that fixing one card leads to issues with another.