Maxis/EA update re nVidia & Pets incompatibility

[witch]

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.

[trancejeremy]

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

[Tamha]

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.

[cabelle]

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. 

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 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.

[blubug]

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).

[LynnMar]

   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.     

[cabelle]

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).

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

[doren]

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.

[Cons]

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.

[LynnMar]

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

[Stitches]

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

Oooo, shiney. 

[jrd]

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

[Stitches]

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.