Silician Sketchbook

Since getting my Inspiron last year, Dell has released a grand total of two driver updates for the NVIDIA 8600M GT. I was actually running a higher non-OEM version of ForceWare that had a fix for the lock-ups I experienced with Source engine games like Portal and TF2, and subsequently downgraded in the misguided belief that the first update would be somehow better.

Surprise, surprise, it was not. I then installed ForceWare 173.80 and have been with it ever since. I don’t know about the performance relative to other versions, but stability is what matters most at the moment, and I get the frame rates I need with an FPS config.

I installed Dell’s second update a couple days ago. It’s been a while, and it’s an OEM release, so I figured, why not.

I’m not really into benchmarks, but at least these new drivers aren’t any less stable. NVIDIA has fixed the TDR problem since late 2007, so it boggles the mind that Dell has been so slow on the uptake.

What I did notice was some potential problems with v-sync in that the frame rate gets cut in half the moment I enter into an open space, and my keyboard and mouse become really “heavy” due to the command lag. If the performance hit was that dramatic in the past, I didn’t notice it. I guess v-sync is getting disabled again.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 2:03 pm and is filed under software.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.