Geforce 7800 visual glitches

When using SL on a Geforce 7800 GT card, I am experiencing weird glitches. I have the latest drivers from nVidia. The glitches are a sudden flash of color - generally a long triangle that will appear for a second and then disappear as I move around. Anyone else experiencing this? I have an eVGA e-GeForce 7800GT with 256 megs of memory running on an Intel Pentium-D w/ Windows XP Media Center 2005, and the 77.76 drivers installed.

the 77.76 drivers are the beta version, try the official 77.77 release driver. Might give it a try.

Hmm no that didn't help but thanks for the suggestion.

While that is an excellent card, you might want to tackle it as a hardware issue. Check for heat buildup (it runs hotter when it has to process tons of graphical needs at once) and check that you have a decent Power Supply feeding a dedicated power feed to run it (those old 300+ Supplies and/or old MB CPUs will be eaten for lunch by this card).

Finally, you could have a bad card, which ONLY shows up its weaknesses under such pressure that SL puts demands upon it in Realtime rendering. On the bright side, sometimes just reseating such a card might clear things up!

I have a GeForce FX5700 Ultra 128MB AGP 8x I'm using in my system and I've been having graphical problems myself with SL only. I've ruled out power supply because usually if the PS is too low other issues will arise like random resets and hard drives not operating normally. I've also ruled out bad hardware unless it's a really obscure problem that only SL triggers as I would expect if the card had bad RAM or similar it would cause problems at other times as well. The interruption is periodic and corrupts the entire framebuffer including the secondary monitor as well as the texture cache it seems as once the framebuffer clears the textures have errors in them that are properly mapped onto the objects. This started after one of SL's major required updates so I'm highly suspecting that new code in the client (will happen sometimes when not connected to server yet) is making calls that some GeForce models choke on.

Things I have learned about SL:

1. Sl doesn't work well with duel monitor set ups. I experience odd slowdowns and such unless I run as a single desktop spanned.

2. SL is not really tuned for high performance cards yet. They simply don't have the cards to test with a lot of the time. Case in point, as of a few weeks ago they did not have any video cards with 512 vram to test with even though 1.7 is supposed to support them.

3. SL client updates have been glitchy as of late and I find deleting SL and reinstalling solves the issues I run into.

4. With a fast processor and high end card it is possible to have a higher client framerate than the server framerate but it doesn't seem to affect anything SL experience wise.

5. I had to load up my system to get SL to run correctly. My 4400+ X2 AMD and 6800 ultra experienced "skipping" when I turned, usually when facing a void the avatar would skip around, in some cases I could only face either north or south. I ended up turning up the AA and AF filtering to maximum, rendering to high quality and turning on vertical sync to get SL to work correctly (not that I am complaining mind you, SL looks beautiful). This ends up with me running with almost idenical framerates as my 2600+ and 6600GT

I think it's a power supply issue. I had exactly the same issue with an eVGA 6800 and an eVGA 7800: color corruption and polygon dropping. Both cards have memory that is extremely sensitive to the quality of power being supplied - the sine waves have to be consistantly within spec. If not, you'll see the problem in SL and other demanding 3D applications first. Buying a new power supply of 500 watts, say, might not solve it; I had to swap through several different brands before I found one that worked.

btw, I've been running SL across a stretched dual monitor set up for eight months. Never had a problem; in fact, the system is more stable than with a single screen. Must be an NVidia driver thang-a-lang.

I hope this gets better, I really do. Along with the ideas of routing IMs to a 2nd monitor and whatnot.



Am also hoping this will be accomodated soon, because geez, SL is a power-lover!



Thanks for sharing that. I enjoy reading all the performance experiences on here, wish there were more benchmark suites done... I know it can't be "standardized" nicely but a few pokes would be better than the vagueness mucking about regarding "What computer setup runs SL the best?" and one is quick to think the obvious fastest processor and video card wins 'em all out.