G80 running out out memory, driver fix under construction
By Theo Valich: Tuesday 31 July 2007, 07:19
IT SEEMS THAT Nvidia's Geforce 8800 series of graphics cards suffers random slowdowns, and this can be particularly problematic for owners of the Geforce 8800GTS 320MB, the cheapest 8800 out there. The problem lies in fact that the G80 GPU has some trouble with texture memory management. In many unrelated cases, this bug starts leaving textures in video memory and system memory, causing the board to run out of texture memory. Once you run out of memory for textures on your graphics card and system, you will experience a lot of swapping with textures on a hard drive, and that is recipe for disaster, at least as far as framerates are concerned.
Some games are more affected than others, it all depends on how the game engine is handling textures. We learned about the situation a while ago, but it has been two weeks and fix is still not out. We heard from Nvidia that testing is well under way, with both Windows XP and Vista - combining these operating systems with different GPUs.
For now, if you experience slowdowns in games and you own GeForce 8800 series card, you can do the alt+tab trick, also known as "switch windows to force texture reload" fix. µ
AFTER OUR ORIGINAL story, we managed to get an update from an Nvidia rep regarding the actual timeframe of the driver release that will fix the 8800 slowdown issue. As it stands right now, fix for this highly annoying bug is planned for a release between the end of August and middle of September. My personal assumption would be that the latter date is a more realistic one. Nvidia stated that this problem is "of complex nature," and it seems to us that fixing one card leads to issues with another.
We wonder whether something went wrong in the whole 320-bit/384-bit memory controller combination, or whether the problem is caused by the fact that game developers were creating games with 256/512/1024 MB boards in mind, and Nvidia showed up with 320/640/768MB ones?
Just in case, if you play Battlefield and are one of numerous gamers plagued by the slowdown problem, Alt+Tab is not the answer you might need. Pascal, one of our readers came back to us and told us that Nvidia encourages you to use special button in the main page of the menu - this button opens a browser outside the game, and then you can swap back into the game without having the game screen destroyed.
It seems that the race for the most interesting/annoying bug of 2007 is now officially open. µ
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