Problems with NVidia 180 series drivers and 9800 gtx/gtx+

After much sorrow and aggravation I have discovered that the 180 series drivers do not work well with the 9800 gtx+ (which I have) and according to the forums, the gtx as well.

On the Palit site is a 180 series driver, but only for Windows. It is OK, works like a dream.

For Linux, the 178 or so (under 180) series drivers are fine.

Symptoms are: black screen when xdm starts, or gdm, or kdm, and that only sometimes. Other times it works. The computer appears to lock up solid, but sometimes it returns to the command line interface, and frees up. Now it is luck if gdm or kdm or xdm start from the command line, or if it hangs up again.

I hope this information saves someone going through the Linux Repair Cycle like I did, before I started doubting the driver...

Hello Angel ^_^
Did you try the latest pre-release drivers (180.27) yet?
You can get them from here for example:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=122606

I myself got a Nvidia 9800gt and had some troubles, mainly with the memory management of the card when I run SL, as well. I cant say that these drivers fixed everything for me, but they're very stable and the fastest since a long time. Maybe with some luck they will work fine too. They also got openGL 3.0 fully integrated which might help once LL decide to try out some openGL 3.0 specific commands.

That's the list of bugfixes:

1. Added support for the following GPUs:
   1. GeForce GTX 295
      
   2. GeForce GTX 285
      
   3. GeForce 9300 GE
      
   4. Quadro NVS 420
      
   
   
2. Fixed a bug that caused VDPAU to display a green screen when using the overlay-based presentation queue with interlaced modes.
   
3. Fixed a bug that prevented VDPAU from working correctly after X server restarts on some GPUs.
   
4. Improved VDPAU's handling of mode switches; eliminated a crash in its mode switch recovery code and a hang in the blit-based presentation queue.
   
5. Fixed a bug that caused VDPAU to crash when using DisplayPort devices.
   
6. Fixed a potential hang in VDPAU when using the blit-based presentation queue on systems with multiple GPUs not in SLI mode.
   
7. Implemented missing error checking of layer data in VDPAU's VdpVideoMixerRender function.
   
8. Improved VDPAU's handling of setups with multiple GPUs, if a subset of the GPUs cannot be supported due to resource limitations.
   
9. Improved GPU video memory management coordination between the NVIDIA X driver and VDPAU.
   
10. Fix potential hang in VDPAU when the overlay is already in use.
    
11. Improved workstation OpenGL performance.
    
12. Fixed an X driver acceleration bug that resulted in Xid errors on GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs.
    
13. Updated the X driver to consider GPUs it does not recognize supported, allowing it to drive some GPUs it previously ignored.
    
14. Added the ability to run distribution provided pre- and post- installation hooks to 'nvidia-installer'; please see the 'nvidia-installer' manual page for details.
    
15. Updated the X driver's metamode parser to allow mode names with periods (i.e. '.'s).
    
16. Fixed a problem with hotkey switching on some recent mobile GPUs.
    
17. worked around a power management regression in and improved compatibility with recent Linux 2.6 kernels.
    

If you decide to give this one a try, good luck ^_^

-Asriazh

Thanks! This is good news, I will try them.

Now that I know how to fix my dead systems (which they are with the dud 180 drivers), I can experiment freely.

I do have stable drivers to fall back on now, and nothing breaks, really.

I will let you know how it goes...

Ok, downloaded, installed, tested - but only 3 times.

It FEELS springier than 177.82, the previous driver.

Before I cry Yippee I will try it a few more times. So far I have restarted kdm 3 times and it worked each time, but I seem to remember that 180.22 worked too, at first.

Maybe NVidia did something right?