81.84 Drivers Crash with HT enabled

Ive heard that these drivers take advantage of multiple cores and maybe this is just a bug. It happens only when HT is enabled and only with the new 8x.xx drivers. Windows Freezes( upon loading ), I hear a high pitch squell come from my computer and it restarts. Does not happen when I disable HT via the bios or when I revert back to 7x.xx drivers. Anyone else having this problem. My motherboard is an Asus P4P800-e Delux using an XFX 6800gt. Maybe this is why the drivers havent reached release status yet, who knows. I enjoy the performance boost from the new drivers but dislike having to disable HT.

Thanks for any help,

 

I can confirm this. I first installed the new drivers, played BF2 for about 2 hours straight, and then when I exited I got some weird driver error, rebooted, and then every time I logged into windows it would freeze and reboot. After turning off HT, the problem went away completely.

 

I have not been able to get any drivers in the 81.xx series to boot on my dual cpu Amd Iwill MPX2.

It gets to the point of loading the display driver then just freeze's with little green line in the top left corner.

Same problem has been reported here.

http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?t=68647

I could get the 80.40's to work but the IQ on them was terrible.

Hopefully Nvidia fixes these drivers soon as it would be nice to get a few more FPS in games.

 

Can you disable one core on the X2? I know you don't want to, but just for kicks- see what it does.

 

I have 2 physical CPU's AMD Barton MP's ( XP's modded )

I would have to remove one of the chips to disable it, and am not really that keen to do atm.

 

Well, it's made for dual core procs, not two seperate procs.

That's probably why. I have no issue with my 3800+ X2

 

Hi obylix,

I don't want to start a wild goose chase but I'd suspect the power supply. Do you have an unshared connector plugged into your 6800 GT? I'm running the 81.84's on my system with HT enabled and not having any problems. Perhaps the new driver ends up putting more power requirements on the card with "two cores" working it over.

 

How long have you been running with HT + 81.84? Like I said in my post, I played over 2 hours of BF2 with zero problems. Then suddenly it couldn't take it anymore and booting was impossible. Not sure what the cause is, but my PSU is a monster (550 watt) and the 6800 ultra has two dedicated rails.

 

Hi Tempest261,

I've been using the 81.84 set for a week and a half. I don't play BF2 so hopefully it's not something unique to it. My first post was in answer to the symptoms described by obylix... namely the squeal and reboot. I had an ATI card that did exactly that when it didn't have the power plug connected. I'm guessing the 6800 GT does the same thing but I haven't actually tried to know for certain. Does yours make the squeal sound, too, or simply reboot? Have you been able to determine the error message? The link below describes how to prevent XP from simply rebooting when you have an unrecoverable error if you haven't already done so... assuming the system is able to get to that point. Maybe that will give us a hint.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/russel_02may13.mspx

 

I've got an X2 and have tried every 81.xx driver set... and I can confirm at least on my rig, there are problems with these drivers.

It seems to be related to cpu usage / management, which makes sense as these drivers supposedly have multi-cpu 'optimizations'. For example, I run F@H (Folding at Home) which uses idle cpu time. With my X2 I run 2 instances... F@H sets itself at idle priority, so if you game or do anything else, it takes a backseat and doesn't cause problems.... Except with the 81.xx drivers. NHL 2006 for example crawls to a halt; I get literally 3-4 fps if I run even 1 instance of F@H with the 81.xx drivers. Revert back to 78.05 and this doesn't happen. I've tried assigning cpu affinity and it doesn't help.

So my take on the 81.xx drivers is -- they've got problems.

 

On a side note BF2 has problems with Audigy 2 sound cards, and can crash to desktop or reboot the pc.

http://forum.eagames.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=3256

You have to install the updated OpenAL supported drivers and OpenALwEAX.exe.

Then rename the "BF2OpenAL.dll" to "BF2OpenAL.dll.bak" in the BF2 folder.

Then copy the "OpenAL32.dll" from the "C:\WINDOWS\system32" folder to the BF2 folder as "BF2OpenAL.dll"

After you do this you will get a good speed up when using hardware audio, without this BF2 can crash if you use hardware and high audio settings.
I was having problems with BF2, untill I did that I had to run software and low audio settings or the game would crash.

And power for me is not the problem why these drivers will not boot past display init, I have a Antec 550 W EPS 12V supply.
Currently I have a Uptime: (5d 23h 47m 30s) on the 78.03 drivers, running 2 versions of Folding@home, Azureus, DC++, Msn Messenger and Mirc running in the background since the pc was started, at this time Memory Usage: (Usage: 699/2048MB (34.13%).
I have played BF2, Call Of Duty & Demo of Cod 2, serious sam demo with all those apps running in the background and not had a single glitch.

 

I don't think its a power issue, I just bought a new thermaltake 500. The "squelling" noise isnt the high pitch BEEP warning you that the aux power isnt connected, its probably just some weird HD noise as a result of the PC freezing. It also seems like if I reinstal the drivers, disable any and all nvidia bootup services/control panels, I can squeeze by and get it to boot with HT enabled, only to have it crash later on during a game.

I can imagine making the switch to drivers that take advantage of dual core systems isnt easy, so I'm sure its just a driver issue we will have to wait to be fixed.

 

Could it also be Creatives infamous "Screech of Death" ??

http://www.google.com.au/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q="screech+of+death"

Note how many results come up with that google search for "Screech of Death".

Creative has had a shocking history with dual cpu support, It took them years to finally release a driver that was SMP compatible for the SBlive series.

 

You know, it's funny you mention the squeeling. I've recently noticed that noise, but only when playing BF2 really (or doing a heavy defrag) and it's when my HDD light is solid. BF2 does it a lot, actually. USUALLY no effect in gameplay, but sometimes it freezes for a second or two.

Is this noise coming from my HDD, or what? BTW- I don't think this is nvidia driver related, because I've been hearing this before I installed the 81.84 set.

 

Ok, well small update. The problem IS the driver. I deactivated automatic reboot upon system error and the msg I receive is basically this:
nv4_display, Error: This device has entered and infinite loop. The device or device drivers are the cause. And this is with the new 81.85 drivers, so no fix. I turn HT off, and works like a charm.
Ah well, maybe the next set will correct this...

 

Hi obylix,

You're probably tired of it but can you tell us your system specs including your motherboard BIOS version? There are quite a number of reasons why a driver can go into an infinite loop and they aren't necessarily the fault of the driver. It perplexes me that I have no problems at all with these drivers while some with similar hardware do. I am a stickler for making sure all my drivers and BIOS are up to date which might be why. I just played F.E.A.R. for several hours without a single problem and I would imagine it would be taxing my components to their limit. Anyway... I'm just curious.

 

Oh, I did forget to list my specs in my bio huh? They arent much different than yours actually.
Mobo: P4P800-E deluxe ( latest beta bios ) <--could be the issue
Proc: P4 2.4ghz
Sound Card: Audigy 2
Ram: 1gig Corsais XMS 3200
GFX: XFX 6800 GT

I'm try new mobo bioses right now, didnt even think it could be those latest betas im using.

So what would cause an infinite loop? First time ive ever had an error like that...

 

I believe it means that the driver is waiting in a loop for the hardware to do something which should have happened much quicker than it did so rather than just hang forever it throws a system error from which the system can't recover. The problem is there are many different things that can cause the card to not respond as quickly as expected... anywhere from bad drivers for the card (which I would believe if my system was having the problem) to faulty hardware... other devices hogging the PCI bus. For example, I remember people getting infinite loops unless they turned off fastwrites. A motherboard bios fixed the problem allowing them to turn fastwrites back on and no longer getting the error.

Faulty memory can do it as well. Have you ever run memtest86 for a few hours on your system to make sure it's ok? Corsair is good stuff but I've had to replace one of their modules which was causing my system to reboot. I don't know if the error was nv4_disp infinite loop, though... I never checked. I just ran memtest and saw that the memory was faulty. Again, I don't want to send you on a wild goose chase so if you're comfortable running older drivers or turning off HT then that is certainly an option.

 

If a memory module was bad then turning HT off would not make a difference.

 

You're probably right. I was just thinking that if the new drivers are making the system do more work it might cause iffy hardware to fail. Like I said, there are many different possible reasons.