EVE Online crashes the Intel X3100 driver when registry hack enabled

I have tried to run EVE Online on my Intel Santa Rosa based laptop (Core2Duo T7300, Intel GMA X3100, 2GB RAM), with the Intel display driver registry hack, but the driver crashes frequently.

The hack involves searching for all the folders in the registry containing "_3dmark06.exe" (many other games and applications are there as well), creating a DWORD key with the name "_Exefile.exe" for the EVE executable then setting it to "1". This supposedly tells the driver to offload some of the 3D calculations to the CPU, which can effectively DOUBLE THE FRAMERATE on my system. (No wonder Intel themselves resort to this hack for many games.)

Login screen and warping in space works fine, however when I redock to a station, in a couple of seconds the screen starts to flash and then it either halts in a BSOD or the driver notifies Windows that it has recovered from a serious error.

The symptoms are alike on Windows XP SP3 and Vista SP1 32-bit (I have all the latest drivers, hotfixes and DirectX runtime). I have tested both the Classic and the Premium graphics (latter only on Vista, on XP its unavailable), with or without Aero, redocking to a station always hangs the driver in a couple of seconds.

The drivers I have tested are:

- XP 14.33.1 (3/20/2008) BSOD FREEZE
- XP 14.33 (2/15/2008) BSOD FREEZE
- XP 14.32.3 (12/29/2007) WORKS

- Vista 15.9 (4/25/2008) FREEZE/RECOVERS
- Vista 15.8 (2/21/2008) FREEZE/RECOVERS

I have notified Intel technical support.
Anyone able to run the EVE client on Vista with the registry hack enabled? (Unfortunately there is no point in running it without, its so slow...)

 

I don't have any suggestion except have you tried checking the official EVE forums?

 

Have you considered that the reason why they don't always enable this might just be that it crashes some games?

Perhaps, if the setting was stable enough to be used generally, they'd enable it globally rather than for individual games?

 

Actually, it's the other way around, games crash the driver. And no, I haven't, because drivers should never, ever crash.

No, the main reason they don't enable it is because some games actually perform better with hardware processing. I see no reason in developing graphics hardware then giving all the hard tasks to the CPU...

Of course your point might hold true about testing: if they didn't have the chance to test a game with this setting, it will not be included in the registry.

But this is entirely off topic speculation. What I want to know is that am I the only one with a driver crashed by EVE Online (caused by any other random factor, such as VGA BIOS or whatnot), or others experience a similar effect?