So, I'm running SWTOR on an 8800GT, and I had it running perfectly (other than the fact that every time SWTOR patched, I would video glitch for about a day before they fixed their patch), no crashes, no pixelated artifacts, etc.

Well, I messed with perfection and upgraded drivers of course. HUGE mistake. I started video glitching (to the point where my entire video locks up, reboot required) and crashing like crazy.

I found an old driver exe on my system and rolled back to 275.27, which fixed the locking up video, however I still experience frequent pixel artifacts, some FPS issues occasionally, and the driver crashes a few times a night -- most of the time the driver is able to recover leading to a black screen -- then swtor loading screen -- then back to where I was.

Is anyone running completely stable with a nVidia 8800GT and if so, can you provide me with some driver info, etc so that I can return to a better gaming experience?

Thanks.

I'm running an 8800GT just fine, well relatively fine, obviously its not the best card for the game but I have no experienced any issues like you have.

I'll check my driver version when im at home and let you know

So, I'm running SWTOR on an 8800GT, and I had it running perfectly (other than the fact that every time SWTOR patched, I would video glitch for about a day before they fixed their patch), no crashes, no pixelated artifacts, etc.

 

Well, I messed with perfection and upgraded drivers of course. HUGE mistake. I started video glitching (to the point where my entire video locks up, reboot required) and crashing like crazy.

 

I found an old driver exe on my system and rolled back to 275.27, which fixed the locking up video, however I still experience frequent pixel artifacts, some FPS issues occasionally, and the driver crashes a few times a night -- most of the time the driver is able to recover leading to a black screen -- then swtor loading screen -- then back to where I was.

 

Is anyone running completely stable with a nVidia 8800GT and if so, can you provide me with some driver info, etc so that I can return to a better gaming experience?

 

Thanks.

The driver crashes a few times a nite! This sounds more like a heat issue.

Buy a can of compressed air, remove video card from PC, hold the fan still to keep it from turning, used air on the card to clean out all the dust and stuff. Install card and use a program to ramp up your fan speed on the card not sure what Nvidia is as i use AMD cards and MSI afterburner. Google is your friend. You might need to clean out you entire PC but the card would be a good start.

If you've already tried several drivers and still having 'instability' issues, perhaps there is more going on here than just the GPU driver?

I'm amazed there are still functioning 8800's in use today. Those things were terrible at dissipating heat.

Excuse me, but isn't it the Heatspreader's 'Task' to dissipate the heat from the chip, and on its turn the air blown towards it? How can a chip not 'dissipate' its heat properly?

I assume you mean the chips itself were just hotheads.

I'm amazed there are still functioning 8800's in use today. Those things were terrible at dissipating heat.

Still rocking a passive cooled 8800GT here tho. Surprised it hasn't set my case on fire in all those years.

It doubles as a furnace in those long cold winters

sorry i cannot speak to drivers as to i learned if the vid card works do not update drivers unless absolutely necessary because half the time it messes many games up.

but read below i have a suggestion since you run the same card i do

i have a 8800 GTX and this video card combined with a core 2 duo the game is very very difficult to play if i do alot of zone changes (i.e. PVP)

I Found one thing that helps called MemClean

what it does is it forces the game to let go of my RAM clearing the Cache. It helps alot with problems.

http://www.koshyjohn.com/software/memclean/

I'm amazed there are still functioning 8800's in use today. Those things were terrible at dissipating heat.

Haha, my old 8800 finally burned up recently in my old rig... Never tried it with TOR though.

I found SWTOR does NOT play nice with unstable cards.

Other games will kick you back to windows or trigger a driver crash... SWTOR will just hard lock and freeze your comp.

Is your card factory overclocked?

Mine was and it caused a ton of crashes. I underclocked it back to the stock settings and all my problems went away.

It's not ideal but I'd rather play the game with slightly less performance than not play at all.

Thanks for all of the suggestions, guys.

I was a bit too busy last night to pull my rig apart and give it a good cleaning, but I'm going to try to give it a shot tonight and see what the results are.

I realize that the pixelation/artifacts normally point to heat issues, I was just hoping that since it coincided with the driver changes and happened literally instantly after a driver change that it was a driver issue.

Who knows, if I clean it well enough maybe I'll be able to pump everything back up to full settings like I was before.

With regards to the overclock question, the card did come factory overclocked. I'll have to look into changing that as well.

Thanks again.

Indeed.

 

Still rocking a passive cooled 8800GT here tho. Surprised it hasn't set my case on fire in all those years.

 

It doubles as a furnace in those long cold winters

Had the 8800gt, no 3rd party cooling on the card. Just recently kicked the bucket ( few months ago ). Was running insanely hot, causing crashes.

Went out, bought a HD 6850 for like $100. Things run 100x better for just that little of price. I suggest anyone still running this card or finding graphics struggling overall ( in any game ) go get a new card.

Oh top it off, i contacted evga after i got my ATI card, they told me to send back my 8800gt..i did, they sent a GTS 450 for free lol.

My 8800gt is an evga too.....I might have to look into trying to get them to send me a gts 450.

What was your angle?

I was running duel 8800's and one of them

Got fried last night while I was playing. The game started turning funny colors and progressively got worse until my computer crashed. Then it would start crashing from just bootin up my pc. I'm hoping it was the fact my card was really outdated and over used rather then the game frying it. I noticed during certain cut scenes in convos the fan would be blowing at max