Found the best 8800 driver

From hours of research and looking at other people's benches with 8800 GTS's and Ultra's, the best drivers for XP32 and 8800 is either 171.17, 171.23, 171.37, or the quadro driver 169.61. Don't bother with any of those new 174 series drivers for XP and 8800's, their minimum fps blows compared to these 3 drivers.

The 171.17 + 171.23 bench basically the same. Haven't been able to compare benches of those ones to the 171.37 so if somebody wants to bench those against each other then you will be able to find the current best 8800 non-quadro driver.

As we are all just figuring out now, nvidia has skipped updating the 8 series in order to attempt to make the inferior 9 series look better in reviewer benchmarks.

If they had not done this, one of those 171 drivers which all three are already WHQL would be on the nvidia site for download.

 

I agree with you, I tried 174.53, 174.74, 174.88, 174.85 but they are not stable in CoD4 multi, after playing a while, screen freezes in game but I can return to desktop with Alt+Tab (i saw driver stop responding error a few times also). After this I cannot play any game so I need to restart. 171.17 better than 174 series, I saw Direct3D error only once, now I will try 171.37.

 

174.74 working the best here .. really haven't faced any problems yet .. performs the best too ..

 

I to am using the 174.74 without issues , and they run great.

Might be that they are more compatible with the G92's as opposed to the G80's.

 

Omega Drivers ! :banana:

 

I think so, 174 series are for G92 chips. 171 are for G80.

 

Best drivers I've used are 174.74. If drivers have slightly better benches or slightly faster FPS, it doesnt necessarily make them better.

 

I'll agree with that statement I have found the 171.xx to have the best blend of performance and stability for me out of all drivers recently but since moving to sli I have had to move to the 174.74 which are still not as stable as the 171.xx, though they are now whql.

 

I also agree, the 174 series does not seem to be best for 8800gtx. The frame rate for them does seem to fluctuate more, making them worse to play with.

About theory that its done on purpose.. don't know maybe it has something to do with the different memory bus size used between G80 and G92 cards.

 

Yeah .. only the G9x seems to on the safer side .. but even then , some newer drivers actually don't support the G92 8800GT/8800GTS without the modded inf .. 174.74 whql didn't i think , but the beta works fine .. lol ...

 

Don't forget that results with different drivers differ with every setup. Otherwise we would all be running pretty much the same driver.

 

i disagree, the 174.74's have been absolutely fantastic for me

 

im running the 169.21 omega driver and its been rock solid and playes everything i feed it. I use wind xp 32 I was waiting for omega to show me which newer version driver i should try next, but if you put in that much effort to test ill give the 174.74 a try thanks.

 

Besides the inability to overclock as much with the 174.XX, I thoroughly enjoy them. The 174.93s to be exact.

 

174.74 run great with CoD4 every night - these are the only set I found to run as smooth as the 169.12's on Vista32

 

174.74 working well here, best driver from nvidia in a long time imo.

 

169.21 for me
XP/32
EFX 8800 GT

About to top 200 titles and have a 95% win ratio so far. Except for a small percentage of games (maybe 10-20) having their own inherent problems that have nothing to do with hardware: I'm getting beyond solid performance out of this 169.21 driver.

I play everything in 1280x1024 w/4xAA, V-Sync, and max settings for DX9 in game, AF is usually done in game.




:nerd:

 

The only problem is, according to Cyberlink PowerDVD 8 "Recommended driver version: 174.53 or later"

 

The 174.xx drivers are the best ones out there for the 8800GT

 

That's not even 'close' to being confirmed yet.

When you can get 95% success with those drivers over 220 titles in XP, lemme know.


Until then: the 169.21 is KING!




:infinity: