I’m using a variety of nVidia cards. Mostly Quadro 900 and 980. Some FX 3000 cards. I’ve been using the 56.72 series nVidia driver for a long time now with no problems.
I was recently forced to start using FX 3400 PCI Express cards. Problem is these cards won’t work with the 56.72 drivers. No problem. I’ll just upgrade to the latest drivers. 71.84. I upgraded my drivers across the board for all my development hardware.
Big mistake.
I’ve encountered all manner of issues. Turning on stencil tests when rendering a large body of geometry brings things to a crawl, random crashes that trace back to glVertex3fv(…) NOT related to stencil tests, and so on.
Revert back to the 56.72 drivers on my AGP hardware. Problems disappear. Reinstall the 71.84. Problems are back. ARGGHH!!!
I contacted nVidia. An engineer told me to add this entry to my registry:
OGL_App_SupportBits with a value of 0x80.
Well, the crashes stopped for the most part. Not completely, but things are better. Performance is somewhat worse but livable. However, the random crashes, even if they are less frequent, are not something I can live with.
Does anyone have a similar experience or any helpful advice?