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Looking at their forums, it should become apparent that nvidia does not care about problems their customers are having. Therefore, I have to turn to people they might listen to or work with to solve such problems - Windows and Microsoft.
I am running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (Retail). My video card is a nVidia Geforce 8800 GT.
The issue is that the video is locking up, flickering, freezing, and even sometimes causing the "blue screen of death" - The problem is widely reported, and is also widely misdiagnosed as overheating. The card is not overheating, let me be quite clear on this. The card is also not old and ready to die (Another common misdiagnosis by techs who would brush difficult problems away.)
The issue is: Whatever nVidia has done with their drivers, they do not get along with Windows 7. The issue, if you search the web, is exclusively a Windows 7 problem.
I saw an article earlier regarding something that was implemented in Vista that would detect if the video drivers were crashing, and attempt to close and restart them without rebooting. I can not remember what this feature is called, nor can I find that info again (I found it while at work and did not save the URL sadly) - but it certainly seems like that's what is going on. The video will flicker while I am in a game, the game will freeze, and then after a second, the screen will go black, then the game will come back up, but at lower graphic detail. Evenually, the game will do the same thing again, and go back to full detail.
That's just a theory, though, of course.
I have tried the latest nvidia drivers, as well as the drivers from Windows update. I have not yet tried the nvidia beta drivers, but have read from other users that there was no luck in using them. Some users reported luck when using the default drivers of WIndows 7, or the Windows Update drivers, but I had no luck, and many others also didn't. I may try rolling back to some much older Vista drivers to see what happens.
In any case, my purpose here was less to get an answer, and more to really just spread the word more about this problem. Maybe a Microsoft employee will see this post and report it to someone who can have their people talk to nvidia's people, so to speak, because nvidia people do not frequent their forums. There are threads there with issues unsolved from over 2 years ago, and those are similar to some other issues we still have today with TV-Out. But that's another topic entirely.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Well, no problems so far beyond some flicker. The flicker does make me nervous, but otherwise, no crashes in almost 24 hours. I have been running Folding@Home on it constantly and it doesn't seem to have had any issues with that, either. Folding@Home has it running at 97-98% GPU usage constantly, and it's sitting at 67 degrees Celsius, which is just fine. It is looking more and more like it was my 8800.
But I do still wonder what the ____ could have caused it to act so crazy, hmm...
After spending a long time trying various fixes and having Nvidia explain that Windows 7 was very demanding of graphics and it was my computer that was probably at fault , I fully solved the problem by installing a n ATI 4770 graphics card which is wonderful , much better than my Nvidia card and operates perfectly.
I did eventually fix this issue by installing the later update of Nvidia drivers (197.13_desktop_win7_winvista_64bit_english_whql) and then updating DirectX. The Nvidia driver update did not solve the problem alone, btw, had to update DirectX. No crashes due to this in a very long time now.
My problem was a bit different but has been fixed now by updating the buggy Seagate disk firmware (cache bug.)
Yours is puzzling, maybe check the Asus forums to see if there could be some incompatibilities between the motherboard and the graphic adapter, this happened on at least one of the Asus models. It seems to be related to the 3D acceleration circuit, according to several previous posts. At this stage, you might want to contact the manufacturer for a refund or replacement, since you've done pretty much everything by the book and wasted enough time already on the problem.
... and, right before going back to XP Pro SP3, I found the solution. It worked for me, I hope it works for everyone: try and disable Aero. I did this by chance yesterday, after installing the latest nVidia beta drivers (257.15) with the same results as always. I noticed that the lines on the screen and the blackouts appeared more quickly and more often when I had more windows opened, or tried to display the start menu, etc, so I just decided to try and disable Aero. The results were instant: the lines disappeared from my screen, and I was playing Left for Dead and Trine for about half an hour total with no problem at all. Moreover, the default video settings for both games were higher than they used to (which can be quite logical, by the way, but makes Aero a really bad bet for gamers). Concretely, the Trine defaults were the highest available (anisotropic 8, antialiasing 4x, very high video quality), while they used to be the half with Aero on (anisotropic 4, antialiasing 2x, also very high video quality). I also tried to open countless windows at the same time, including 3 media players (WinAmp, VLC and Win Media Player), switched from one to another with no problem at all... perfect. I even got to guess it might have been caused by some kinf of corruption in my custom Aero theme, so I tried to enable a Windows 7 default Aero theme - as soon as I did it, the lines were there again, and it did cost me another driver crash to be able to swith Aero off again. Right now, I'm running the latest 19x.xx WHQL'd driver version, and my computer is, once again, perfectly stable.
So, to sum up, issue solved for me, I hope it helps somebody else too... and, if you take a look at this thread, other people have solved it by disabling some of the Windows UI visual enhancements. To me, it still looks (and it will always look) as a driver issue. The reasons seem obvious to me:
It's also a curious fact that many people has other symptoms, and even a few have no problem at all, with can mislead to hardware issues (I did think of it myself, too) and such. However, there's a quite reasonable explaination for that: no matter if you are running a 8800GTS (as I am), a 8800GT, a GTX260, a 9800GT (to mention some of the top-sellers and thus top affected cards), the driver you will be installing is THE SAME. It's even the same for Vista and for 7 (althought I quess that the driver bundle will install some different libraries depending on the OS and maybe the GPU). Take a look at the list of supported products:http://www.nvidia.es/object/win7_winvista_64bit_197.45_whql_es.html. However, the GPU's are not the same, and the card builds (not the chipset) even vary depending on the manufacturer (XFX, Sparkle, ASUS...), so the symptoms don't have to be exactly the same if it is caused by a driver issue.
I also agree with some versions I've read over the internet, that this can cause the card to get fried (this is where the manufacturers play their role: if a driver forces a graphics card, causing it to overheat, and it is not properly cooled... g'bye, graphics card). Some people, after installing the driver, started to see artifacts on the screen, even in the initial RAM count screen, in the BIOS, etc. This is, when the driver has not even loaded. I don't know what is nVidia doing with their drivers, but they are surely loosing their customers' trust... while ATI continues releasing great-looking and great-performing cards. I'd say they really need to focus on this one, and stop announcing that their new drivers make this game look 4% better, the other one 6% better... if I cannot even run my OS crash-free, how can I enjoy a game experience?
