Dell/AW Beta Driver 196.86 (DPC Driver) - Game Performance Related Discussion

The patch helped. Dirt 2 went from 27 fps to 50. Still slower than the dual 4870s though.

 

Perhaps because other systems constantly remain well under 200-500µs Latency even when taxing them heavily in the same manner? Just a guess.

 

Some of you may notice with this driver one GPU is not downclocking after exiting a game. Here is what I have found -

Since NV changed the control panel to include the 'Power Management Mode' selection in 3D profiles, there has been a bug where one GPU will not downclock after exiting a 3D application/game. I remember first seeing this in the 195.55 release last November. NV did not fix this bug in 195.62, 195.81 or the 196.86 driver - basically every driver released under the Verde Project.

After looking into this further today, the workaround is to leave the Power Management Mode in Global settings/3D custom Profile set to "Adaptive". Do not set it to 'Prefer Maximum Performance'. If you do, you will see one GPU locked at 3D clocks even after terminating the app. This will persist until system reboot. As far as I can tell, there is no change in game performance from Adaptive to Prefer Maximum Performance settings.

Thanks to Kade Storm for helping to confirm on his two systems.

 

After installing this driver, windows started up with some crazy colors.
But that's already known issue.
Another thing is, after the windows start up, i get a notification like "Your GPUs are not connected by a SLI connector. Multi GPU will still function but it is recommended that you connect them by a SLI connector".
SLI is enabled in the control panel.
Anyone has the same issue?

 

. . .really? That doesn't sound quite up there where I was expecting the results to be at the time.

Everything maxed out, I assume, yes? I was using 2xAA on a single 8800m GTX - average was 33.

 

Upgraded to this beta driver from Dell drivers. In game performance in Far Cry 2 & Need For Speed Shift is OK, (NFS is faster with this driver, might also be because latency is down by a lot

 

Ran a quick game of Batman: Arkym aslyum, frame rates 50-60 but there was slight micro-stutter and I have only experienced that with the beta driver so thats part of the list now. the game still plays well, the micro stutter doesnt completely bog gameplay down and is just an annoyance.

 

Some older games appear to have a noticeably worse performance with this beta driver (compared to 195.62, etc.), even with the proper SLI profiles added in. Sorry, no benches, just what I've been experiencing while gaming so far.

 

I've noticed a serious drop in performance in Mass Effect 2, in fact last night I was getting audio stuttering with major slow downs. I have no problems with 195.62 other then the audio stutter outside of games. Seems they moved the problem on me. I'm going to do some more debugging tonight to see whats up.

 

I knew I shouldn't not of installed this deiver but I said let me do it anyways and now I have spikes over 1 million us on my regular os. And when those spikes occur, myy system freezes for a whole 5secs....

I'm just going to reinstall my os again and clean it out. My benchmarking os isn't affected...

btw I installed it on my 9400m

 

thanks dell. when i start my computer with my 9400m
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC2wuzrHf3g

 

Just played some Need for Speed shift, plays really well no drop in frame rate at all even with all settings on high. oh and make sure your physx is enabled it plays crappy without it.

 

but overall all work fine?

 

That color cycling is expected Don. Known issue with the driver. Why not stick with the NV driver you were using before? As stated by NV, the DPC Latency issue was caused by the display driver remaining in a DPC state. This extended DPC state was the cause of the audio interrupts. This only occured as the GPUs downclocked. Since the 9400M G does not change clock rates, this driver will not make a difference for you (since you are running ATI discrete GPUs).

 

It says right in the release notes that would happen. Remember this is a BETA driver.

 

I will uninstall it.

 

Dragon Age: Origins plays horrible, very poor use of SLI, ran the game through with single gpu use, and indoor play was 59fps, denerim market plunked down to 20 to 30fps. But I play all of my games in SLI configuration. This might be contributed to the nvidia GPU's, but it could be a driver issue too. Settings on high, 2AA.

 

with nhancer the newest sli profile from batboy and throttle stop running I never get fps drops under38 fps even outside and in heavy fighting.

 

I will give it a try this evening, although I still believe the driver should take care of this issue.

 

After some further testing this driver is repeatedly timing out on me so I will get a freeze for a short period of time and then a blink to black and back. If I alt-tab out I've got the message "Display Driver stopped responding and has recovered" coming out of my system tray. This is while playing Mass Effect 2.

Basically the same problem listed here:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/wddm_timeout.mspx

I didn't have a problem with the version of the drivers on NVidia's site so hopefully it is something they will fix.

 

Well i was wondering why sli was disabled when booting up and freaking horrible frame rates when playing bad company 2, i liked the prior drivers i was using, has anyone tried using desktop drivers for the gtx 260?

 

Has anyone solved the issues with 196.86 drivers and Crysis yet? I tried to play it for the first time today since i upgraded to the new drivers only to experience the 2-4 second lockups mentioned previously.

 

That is interesting, I installed that driver with brand new win7 system, and after reboot, screen will become to pure blue , red...green....before the win7 logon screen, that was scary. Is that a problem?

 

Dell released another beta a few days ago. I haven't tried it yet (actually, I don't even own this laptop), but it should fix your problem according to the release notes:

1.Fixes the white lines issue on reboot.
2.Fixes the flashing red, blue, and green backgrounds on reboot.
3.Has DPC latency update from 196.86 Beta

http://support.dell.com/support/dow...typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&fileid=389293

 

thanks for that， I will try it tonite.

 

be aware -