Crap.

[Herkalees]

I'm back, check out my post here to catch up... (http://www.xp-erience.org/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=21833)

After all of that in the post, I went and removed SP1 (the format way). I reinstalled GTA 3, updated it with the "yellow-text-box-menu thingy" patch (which was needed and worked) and I still get a problem about 8 seconds into the game.

Before, it froze up or went to a black screen, now it goes to a blue screen with a bunch of crap about how the system encountered an error with the program and needs to be rebooted. It also gives me this message at the bottom:

"STOP: 0x0000008e (0xc0000005, 0xbfa4a353, 0xba60bb88, 0x00000000)

NV4_DISP.dll address bfa4a353 base at bf998000, date stamp 3d3478e4"

Oh, after doing the reformat, and before installing GTA 3, I downloaded the Det Drivers (30.82). I chose those over the 40.'s because they are WHQL (sp?) certified or whatever, thinking it might help. It didn't.

Any of you super-smart people have any idea what that message above refers to and if it can easily be fixed?

 

[Octopus]

I searched for a cure for your problem.I found two sites that might help you.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q314215


http://www.guru3d.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=31555&highlight=nv4disp

 

[Joseph]

Ironicly, over all four of my PC's (and 2 year's using NVidia based GPU's), I've found the "WHQL" NV Driver's cause more problems with 3D applications than non-WHQL. Esp on my XP/NT machine's (go figure lol).
I still try the latest WHQL drivers when they're released to see if MS has gotten they're **** together, but something always b0rk's and I end up going back to the non-WHQL drivers every time.

I had the same deal with GTA3+WHQL NV drivers+WinXP.
Tore them out and slapped in the set of latest non-WHQL NV drivers and I have been fine with GTA3 since.

I'm seriosly getting to the point of ingoring WHQL NV driver's all together

 

[Vorpal]

Yes, buy an ATI 9700 and you will have no more NVIDIA driver problems.

 

[Joseph]

Actualy, if ya scrounge around the help forum of www.gta3forums.com, more people with ATI based GPU's are having problems with GTA3 than those with NVidia based GPU's.
Most that are having trouble with NVidia based GPU's+GTA3 are the simple "Yellow Text Box" bug, which is a boo-boo on MS's part with DX8.1, not NVidia.

 

[Sazar]

Originally posted by Vorpal
Yes, buy an ATI 9700 and you will have no more NVIDIA driver problems.

lol...

 

[Sazar]

the only big problem for ati with gta3 was thick fog... and this was through catalyst set 2.1 after which they rectified it... even then it was not that big a deal... just couldn't play late night early morning @ full speed since the fog rendering was thick...

like for nvidia.. most problems for ati WERE with the thick fog...

 

[Shamus MacNoob]

lmao

Originally posted by Sazar
lol...

I love this nvidia vs ati




ATI!!! ATI!!!












lolol

 

[Joseph]

Originally posted by Vorpal
Yes, buy an ATI 9700 and you will have no more NVIDIA driver problems.

I see one problem with that solution: ATI 9000/9700 have no support for DX9 contrary to ATI's lates "naming" habbit's. They only support DX8.1 max.

This isn't the first time I've heard of this little "crimp", but stumbling over this over at http://www.neowin.net reminded me:

FROM THE FIRST moment ATI introduced its 9X00 generation of cards we were a bit confused. We couldn't work out whether ATI had changed its naming logic or not. To remind you, last year ATI decided to change the name of all cards depending on model and the version of DirectX supported. So, cards that were DirectX 7 compatible such as the original Radeon and its derivates where named Radeon 7x00 [the 'x' represents a number that varies from 0, 2, 5 or even 7]. Radeons that have support for DirectX 8.1 and all its features were named 8500 where first digit represented DX 8 support.

This year's Radeon's 9000 and 9700 should have support for DirectX 9 since their name starts with a 9, but this time ATI has changed its mind. For the high-end Radeon 9700 part, we can surely say that it has full support for DirectX 9 but Radeon 9000 and 9000 PRO have support for DirectX 8.1 only.

This leads us to wonder what standard of naming it's cards ATI actually chose this time around. Its clear that with the 9000 generation, the first digit is not assigned to DirectX support and we are waiting for some explanation from ATI at this time. Since 9000 is a bigger number than 8500 everyone expects that 9000 and 9000 PROs to be faster than 8500 and 8500 LEs but this is not the case! Beware of this marketing trick. Although we should add that Radeon 9000 is good mainstream part -- one of the few that can give you DirectX 8.1 support for about 120 USD.

The next Radeon could actually be called Radeon 10000 which is indeed a nice marketing number but caertainly won't represent DirectX 10 support since not even DirectX 9 is launched at this time

I have nothing againced ATI at all, and I find the "ATI vs. NVidia" arguments rather childish
I'm sure ATI will come up with a solution in a GPU BIOS update or something of the like.

 

[Nismo83]

i'm curious 'bout what lmao stands for? LoL

 

[Herkalees]

Hey

To solve the nVidia vs. ATI debate (at least in my situation), I have fixed my problem as of 2 hours ago, and it had nothing to do with the vid card... it was a moron and forgot to install some drivers meant for my motherboard.

Once they were installed, AGP woke the F up and I am in 3D heaven, fragging everything in site in UT2003. I appreciate all the assistance thus far.

-I am a certified ninja-

 

[Flatbeat_Eddy]

LMAO = Laughing my ass off!

 

[Sazar]

ati has complied with the standards that were put forth for the dx9 drivers and the cards are said to comply with them far as I know from reviews at many websites...

• 0.15-micron GPU
• 110+ million transistors
• 8 pixel rendering pipelines, 1 texture unit per pipeline, can do 16 textures per pass
• 4 programmable vect4 vertex shader pipelines
• 256-bit DDR memory bus
• up to 256MB of memory on board, clocked at over 300MHz (resulting in a minimum of 19.2GB/s of memory bandwidth)
• AGP 8X Support
• Full DX9 Pixel and Vertex Shader Support
• Single Full Speed 165MHz integrated TMDS transmitter

that was the whitepaper release specs put forth... note that the default clock for the 9700 is 325/310

this is from www.anandtech.com

also there is mention on many other sites I have seen that both the r300 and nv30 will be the first to have dx9 support and are therefore future proof through the next year or so...

concerning dx9... we just saw the release of the first fully compliant dx8.1 supported game far as I know... in ut2k3...

what do I think of it? I think its a great game with massive memory leak issues

and at this rate we should probably have dx9 games next year at the end of the year unless doom III supports it...

 

[Joseph]

Yeah, I've been eye-ball'n UT2K3 since it's release, but I've been hounded with bills, so it has a low priority ATM

I can't wait for DoomIII. I'm a boneified DooM crack baby, first PC game I ever played
I even went so far as to buy the DooM novel's, which were surprisingly excellent. I still re-read them to this day every so often