nVidia Drivers v1.75.16 - tried them yet?

I've downloaded nVidia's latest drivers, and am about to check them out - anyone done so already and had any noticeable improvement/problem to report? I'm kinda trying a bunch of stuff at the same time (I know, one change at a time) - I just got my new sheeps ... er, RAM in the mail, bringing me from 1.5g to 3g, and I (as an experiment) turned 1g into a ramdrive to hold SL's cache. Gonna see if that makes any appreciable difference in texture rez-time (at least for cached textures). So far, I'm not seeing a whole lot of improvement on that front. Hrm. Probably overhead due to whatever encoding the cache files are stored as (since everyone would flip out if the cached textures were in, you know, a /useable/ format). Although... it makes me think there might be a market out there for a third-party viewer that DOES store the textures as raw files or whatever - anything to boost the time it takes to compose each frame. Who knows.

Back on track - any word on the new nVidia drivers? I'll post my experiences here when the upgrade is complete.

I've used them. I haven't seen any change in my regular 10 minute bluescreens while Second Life is open.

i use em on my 8800GTX in vista32. theyre the best drivers yet...

Well, I've finished my experimentation. With my 8600GTS, I seem to get /maybe/ a 2-4fps increase - in a mostly static scene. No bluescreens, don't know what problem you've got there, Nih, but BSODs are almost always caused by drivers or faulty hardware. It may only show up in SL if SL is the most taxing thing you run. Correlation is not causation.

As far as my experiment with using a ramdisk for the cache - either my ramdisk driver is hideously slow, or SL's caching scheme sucks. Yes, yes, I already know which of those it is. Seems the real bottleneck for rendering textures is the decoding process after all, rather than the fetching from cache. I saw very little noticeable improvement with the cache on a ramdisk. Given the incredibly low cost of space, it really does seem that the cache should store uncompressed, ready-to-use textures. I'm just confidant enough of my programming ability, however, to know that I'd completely screw it up if I tried it myself.

No!

I can't SL to run at all with these drivers. It says the drivers are unsupported. I tried both the release candidate and the default viewer; no luck.

Ive run them since they were in beta on a 64bit Vista system and very good drivers running dual 8800GT's

I've been running this driver for a couple of days and just this morning, I'm noticing some odd pixels running across my screen. I can't help but think it's the driver.

http://i268.photobucket.com/albums/jj5/hlilliehook/Oddpixels_001.jpg

My house doesn't have this long pointy thing running through it!

HoneyBear, check your cooling - that kind of artifact is almost /always/ due to overheating GPU. Your graphics card should have a fan on it - make sure it's spinning smoothly and fast. Get a can of compressed air and blow out any dust (while the computer is off!) and see if that helps. Also, check your CPU's fan, while you're in there. My wife's computer had the exact same problem - and it was all down to overheating. I actually ended up having to replace the CPU cooler and put it in a better case with more airflow - but in general, just checking your fans and cleaning up the dust will do.

And don't wait for it to get really bad, you can damage the GPU core and then you get permanent artifacts. ~_~ I have that problem.

I've been considering installing the before mentioned drivers, been holding out for some time.