OpenGL Troubles on an ASUS Geforce

Hi. I’ve been plagued by this problem for the last month or so on my own, but without success.

A few weeks back, my ASUS V-6600 GeForce 256 graphics card suddenly lost its ability to display OpenGL at all. OpenGL games either give an error message about being unable to use OpenGL or crash altogether, and 3D applications fail to produce an image, usually showing the desktop through display windows which should be using OpenGL. Even OpenGL screen savers fail to function (they do not seem to start at all).

Direct3D is still working fine, as is the standard 2D display. I am quite certain that I did not install any
utilities, software or drivers that should have interfered with the graphics drivers or hardware. OpenGL used to work fine, but does so no more, and for no apparent reason.

At first I thought that my card had developed a physical fault, but then I removed it from my computer and replaced it with my old STB TNT card. The problem persisted.

I have reinstalled several versions of the drivers, both the nVidia supplied Detonator reference drivers and ASUS card-specific drivers (removing the old drivers and all .dll’s starting with nv*), but this did not help. Currently I am using the Detonator 3.68 driver set.

I have gotten some OpenGL functionality back by restoring the software-based OpenGL.dll and
OpenGL32.dll to their original filenames (they were mysteriously named *.bak’s), and now some OpenGL applications (screensavers, others) work, but apparently in software-based OpenGL.

Oh, and the ASUS customer support email address has not replied to any of my messages.

I have tried to solve the problem on my own, but to no avail. Any help or advice anyone could give would be greatly appreciated.

Have you tried the “common” trick that consists in editing your win.ini file ??

If not, do the following : open win.ini (which should be in C:\WINDOWS).

Find the line : DVA=0
Comment the line (put a semi-column at the beginning of the line) : ;DVA=0

And then reboot…

This solved a lot of problems for a lot of people…

Hope it will help you !

Eric

YES. THAT DID IT.

What an earth could cause such a line appear in win.ini? I cannot fathom what could have put it there. What is its sinister purpose?

Now everything works perfectly.

Well, I think nobody gave a proper explanation on this line : its role, how it appears…

Anyway, as long as your machine now works…

Have fun !

Eric

At a guess
Digital Video Output, do these boards you have video out apart from the monitor connection?

No, this particular board does not have a separate video output.

And shouldn’t it in that case be DVO instead of DVA?