More Awesome Than You!

So Maxis/EA seem to have tracked down the problem between some nVidia cards and Pets. You can read about it here  (http://bbs.thesims2.ea.com/community/bbs/messages.php?&threadID=0c1082c44222d6e7b8212176899d5b26&directoryID=2) but the work-around according to Maxoid Sam is as follows:

"Enter the cheat code "boolprop useshaders false" in the console (while the game is running, type CTRL-SHIFT-C to bring up the console to enter the code -- do not type the quotation marks when entering it). Unfortunately this will disable some of the nicer graphics capabilities of these cards, but at least it will get the game running while we figure out how to get you a better solution.

A few of you have posted some info about your PC's that has been very helpful in tracking this down. Can you also email me your "DXDIAG" info from your PC? That will help us narrow down the problem even further.

To do this, press START--->RUN---> and type "dxdiag" in the dialog box (no quotes). Once that's up, press "Save All Information". This will prompt your PC to save a file to your computer. Save that file to your desktop, then email it to me at splayer@ea.com."

So we'll have to say goodbye to the fish until they get this worked out? That's a shame. I hope they're finally able to get the problems taken care of. I upgraded to a Nvidia Geforce 7600 because I wasn't sure which ATI I should get that would be the equivalent. It was disappointing to still experience occasional crashes and reboots.  :(

Translation: "At least it will get the game running while we ignore the issue for even longer."

I can live without the fish... and as long as Seasons is playable.  :P

Crap... I'm in the market for upgrading my hardware (computer processor and graphics card)... I tend to prefer nVidia... does this mean I will be forced to go ATI now? Ugh. Stupid Maxis EA! >:(

Ste

I use nVidia and haven't had a problem. I have a GeForce 6600 GT 128mb and I see fish, fingers, bumpmaps and all the other fun stuff without any of the bsod that some people have. I think I use a driver I got from The Guru of 3D ~ I would have to check to make sure.

I swopped to ATI last upgrade, I had lots of nvidia problems with drivers. All for a game! I like nvidia better too.

I have 2 nvidia geforce 7900 cards and I havnt had any problems, is it model specific?

I got a nvidia geforce 7800 GS and haven't seen any problems while playing.  I don't update my video card drivers often though so their quite old.  If it works i don't break it.

What is really disturbing is that MTS2 has had that fix posted in their FAQ's since October.  :-\  And if you do a search for invisible fish...the same advice is given many moons before the FAQ.   I run ATI cards and haven't had a lick of trouble, but I certainly feel for people who are battling the BSOD with the Nvidias.

Well... I haven't had a problem either, but my current nVidia card is quite old.  It's a 5950 (or something like that), Ultra, GeForceFX or whatever.  I don't think I ever had the invisible fish problem.  But I'm still using the driver that came with it.

Anyways, I'm just worried about when I upgrade, if it will become a problem.  I would rather avoid it if possible.  Anyone care to reply with a comparison of pros and cons between ATI and nVidia?  I know I probably should just read the links in the pinned thread about machine upgrades... but I feel like those sites are just a tad overwhelming for me.  Not that I don't understand 'em, it's just that my eyes glaze over whenever I have to read up and do research about computer hardware. Ugh. I hate hardware. >:(

Plus... I'm lazy. :P

Ste

ooo me too - I'm going to upgrade my MOBO and video card soon so I can run (whisper it) _{another game} - it will improve my Sims experience too.  Please post on what you decide to do - I'd be interested to read it.

My understanding is that there are some core game engine issues with the nvidia video chipset. Some games just suit some hardware better, last time this topic came up someone mentioned nvidia and Doom going together like horse and carriage.

I haven't had any video problems with ATI, I have a Radeon X850 and would have liked something gruntier but couldn't afford it. Before I was running nvidia 5700. I like the nvidia interface better and it seems more tweakable, but I'll stick with ATI for now.+

I can run sims will all graphics options turned up full even on big lots with many sims, so the card must be OK, but I also have a good processor and the sims is quite processor reliant.

The ATI card I was looking at was something like 1800 or 1900, I thought the new memory ring architecture sounded interesting and would have liked to have tried that out, to see if it was any faster.

I got a Nvidia card before I knew there was such a problem with them. I have the 8800 GTS and when I installed the drivers for it off the website everything was horribly blurry. All my fonts and a lot of smaller graphics were hard to see. I uninstalled the drivers from the website and installed the ones that came on the disc I got with my card and perfect crystal clear images and font. Apparently most problems with Nvidia cards right now are all in the latest drivers that have been released and rolling back your drivers to an older version (before the problems started happening in the September drivers I believe) usually does the trick. Hopefully Nvidia will get their asses in gear and make drivers that actually work from now on...

Long before September last year, I was having problems in 2005, I used a driver version about 78.something, after experimenting with many different versions. I used to get graphical artifacts - weird flashing geometric shapes and stuff.

I've got an Nvidia 6600GT. (Don't know if it is relevant, but my motherboard is based on an Nvidia chipset as well.) For quite some time after i installed OFB, I had problems with blue screen crashes, usually about 20 minutes after load. I tried every Nvida driver available, but they all caused some fairly serious issues with my game.

Finally I doubled my RAM to 2GB and it all went away. I realize the basic problem is stilll there, but I can stilll play as long as I like with all the settings cranked up.

I'm looking at a new video card now. The current card is fine for the Sims, but I'd like to play some other more demanding games at top settings. In part because of the Sims problems, I'm probably going for an ATI next time. (Unless I find myself unable to resist an Nvidia 8800 GTS. ATI is coming out with a DX10 card in March, but I'm expecting it to be outside my budget for a while.)

Good to know that EA is publicly addressing the issue now anyway.

In the end, ATI and Nvidia are equal as companies, although one specific card may be better than another specific card. ATI does some things better, Nvidia does other things better. For awhile, ATI was lagging behind and hadn't developed pixel shaders, but that changed with the X1xxx series. Twain had been an Nvidia supporter since I first started reading his posts, but the first time there was a problem with the drivers and TS2 and it was 9 months before Nvidia developed a driver that worked, even he started telling people to buy ATI.  TS2 runs better on ATI cards and always will because Maxis/EA developers use ATI cards.  Until these problems, I always said buy whichever card you could afford and ignore the brand name, but for Simmers, there just have been too many problems with Nvidia in the past almost 2 years. It may still exist, but at the least I haven't HEARD of anyone having problems like this on ATI cards on other games that are optimized for Nvidia cards (there was one small thing with Age of Empires when it first came out that was fixed in the first patch and they'd developed the work-around before the game hit the shelves) *shrug* Everyone has to make the decision for themselves, but when I'm in the market for a new card, unless I've just gotten sick of Sims and won't play anymore, I'm buying ATI.

I used to have an nVidia card but got sick of all of the problems. I now have an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro and WOW it is nothing short of amazing.

I have the same card, and I'm using old drivers from Nvidia website: 81.98 and it works like a charm! I've had no crashes, no bluscreens, I have all fingers and fish, bumpmaps and everything. Probably wouldn't go as far as to recommend the card, but if you have it and are having problems, these drivers work fine with me. So fine, I'm too afraid to try the new ones. I had BSOD with lots of drivers after OFB and ended up mucking the whole system. :) (Actually, that was me being an idiot, I'm keeping my hands off driver cleaners)
*edit: Although the driver I said above has worked very well since the time I got more RAM. So both combined to make a good combo I guess. I don't fiddle with it anymore.

I hope EA posts this info in a sticky. It's hard to find in the middle of a long thread, so many people won't see it.
I have always had Nvidia cards and been fine, perhaps having 1 gig ram has saved me  :)

I haven't seen any problems with my Geforce 6100 but I haven't looked and seen if there were fish in the aquarium.  My Integrated Geforce 4MX chipset had no issues but I stopped using it when Nightlife came out.  I also never have problems with new drivers so I could just be lucky.

I think the whole nVidia and ATI thing has to do with the fact that nVidia is better at OpenGL than ATI (which is why Doom3 runs so well on nVidia cards).  The Sims 2 supposedly runs off Direct3D which both cards are pretty much equal on.  This may have changed since I heard this though.

The fact TS2 uses Direct3D makes it impossible to run with Wine, and I doubt it's changed since I last checked.

Interesting.

I have an ATI Radeon 9600 256MB, and it's totally awesome, and I have a nVidia 6200 256MB, which works great though stutters when a lot is humongous (makes sense, since the card is more on the low-end). I honestly don't see any difference between ATI and nVidia. As long as the silly thing works and your game is good, who the heck cares?

By the way, I've never had that fish problem. I'm half-convinced that new drivers are to blame. I'm still using 77.77. Started using them because of that neon-newspaper-and-pillow glitch, and I don't see ANY reason to update them. If it works, don't mess with it. Especially not on the advice of EA's customer support!

Which 7600? GS or GT? And AGP or PCI-Express?  I've been playing a 7600 GS AGP and have no had a crash or any other sort of problem, and I probably play 2-3 hours a day at least.

I am getting ready to spend my tax refund on a new machine too so I was glad to see this thread although not happy to read the news about Nvidia.  I have a 6600 right now and it ran Sims 2 perfect.  That is - until I bought Burning Crusade for WoW and started crashing (not in Sims, only in WoW). 

The error report (sent to Microsoft) indicated I needed a new driver so I went to the Nvidia site and downloaded the latest (I bought this PC about 18 mos ago and it was running whatever it came with).  Sure enough, it fixed my WoW problem right up but started crashing my SIMS!!  Argh.  Rolling back the old driver fixed my Sims but rebroke WoW.

For the time being I am keeping the new driver - I don't get any weird graphical glitches and never have, just a blue screen after I spend a lengthy period of time in a house so I just try to remember to save frequently.  I would almost believe that I am having some kind of overheating problem but I had the computer custom built and would have thought they would have taken what kind of power supply and cooling I needed into consideration for the hardware I was buying. (Not that I know even the first thing about hardware).

At any rate I was really looking forward to upgrading my Nvidia card in my new box but I am not sure I want to have to choose between which game I want to play without crashing :(

So buy an ATI card, and you won't have to choose.  ::)

Later drivers often just add more goodies for later cards, your card if it's older will not be able to use newer features anyway. There's no loss by using older drivers and less chance of problems and incompatibilities.

I used to have a 6600 (it died) and Nvidia was terrible about the drivers for it.  The newer ones almost never worked right for the Sims or most other games. Nice card, but horrible support by Nviidia

It's interesting to see that NVida cards are having a worse problem than my brand new ATI Radeon did with the Pets patch. My game didn't crash, but all the neighborhoods were flashing red, as if some kind of terrain were missing. I tried removing my DL folder first, then I tried deleting the whole Sims 2 folder so it would be regenerated at start up, then I extractd the base neighborhoods from the base game in case they were corrupted and regenerated the Sims 2 folder again,, then I uninstalled Pets (which fixed the problem). I reinstalled Pets, but I'm leaving off the patch for now, going to double check mod updates first and then set a system restore immediately before repatching in case it fubars my neighborhoods again.

I have the same card you have, 7600 GS AGP. Admittedly my problems are not really bad, it will tend to happen during my marathon playing sessions of 4+ hours.  :-[ Or if I web surf for an hour or so before I start playing. If I turn of the computer and give it a 20 minute break before I begin playing and then another 20 minute break every 2-3 hours of gameplay I don't have the problems. When it does the reboot Windows error says that the problem was due to the "device driver" forcing Windows to shut down. I'm using the drivers from November.

I had almost the same problem and the same error message and it turned out that it wasn't the graphics drivers as it was reporting. I know because even after I did a complete format of my hard disk and installed windows from scratch, I got the same error first time I loaded windows, before I installed any drivers. It was about faulty RAM installation (as far as I can remember).

   You know,  Come to think about it,  I believe I lost my fish when I updated my driver.  I am using 97. something and I was using 91 something.

I think I will go back to the old driver and see if my fish come back.

I know it is not that big of a problem, the no fishies,  but it drives me bonkers with my Obsessive, compulsive disorder.     ;D

Thanks Blubug I'll make sure to look into that.  :)

The blue screen/crashing problem disappears when using an older NVidia driver. I am using version 7.7.7.2 (June 2005) after my system kept crashing after the installation of an updated driver. There was a discussion about it in a German forum some time ago and apart from a few people who were unable to install the older driver it worked for everyone who had this problem. 7.7.7.2  is the last one that worked as far as I know.

I had it in OFB, just installed Pets tonight, but it loaded ok and no apparent problems and yes I put the patch in it. But I'm using an old driver which seems to work just fine. In order to kill off the weird colors, etc....that I had in OFB. So seems to be fine so far..using the 7.1.8.9 driver. I have a GF6600 256 meg card.

I switched back to an older driver,  85 something and still I did not get my fish back,  the only time I ever had the blue screen with any driver was after installing pets and someone suggested to me to put "useshaderstrue" in my startup file so that I could see my fish again.

well the fish came back but then it started crashing so I had to remove the use shaders from my startup file.    Why did the stupid EA people give us a new fish tank but then they took away our fish???   
 They got a bunch of  nuts working there,  Like a  zoo  for the programming challenged.   rofl

http://www.omegadrivers.net/nvidia.php (http://www.omegadrivers.net/nvidia.php)

Oooo, shiney.  ;)

Omega drivers aren't updated anymore. Get the NGO HQ ones.
http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=Files

So far I haven't had any reason to switch away from the Omega drivers. They're solid and stable and most importantly to the current conversation, they work well with TS2. People with newer cards benefit from updated drivers, but I have a three year old Alienware mobility card that vomits all over every other drivers that I've ever tested.  :P