Dear Nvidia:

[jsbowden]

Until I recently bought the GeForce 9800 GTX+ I have now, I hadn't given you any of my money since back in June of 2000. My recent purchase reminds me WHY.

The fucking thing is unstable as hell. The Witcher? I will apparently never get to finish this game, since you will not run it for more than about half a minute before you crash to the desktop with a driver error. Crysis? As long as I only want to see it in DX9, everything is great! DX10, not so much. Anything running on the HL1 engine is random; sometimes Counterstrike will run for hours glitch free and then I'll be looking at driver crashes every few minutes. HL2 based games run fine, however. Other things are just as random, where they either run fine, run fine for a while at random, or are totally unplayable. And these are games with a fucking Nvidia logo spammed into their start up cinematics, like Neverwinter Nights, which your hardware can't seem to reliably deal with.

And I'm sure by this time next year, you will have abandoned me on the driver update front as well, since you orphan hardware like it's going out of style.

Next upgrade cycle? It's back to ATi.

Comments

[publius1.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised you went with the GTX+, rather than their newer offerings like the 2mumblemumble. The things I heard about the 9800 GTX+ were along the lines of "incremental improvement over the GT at best" at the time. Unless I'm thinking of the 8800, heh.

Is there any chance that it's just bad hardware? Have you tried a replacement yet?

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

The GTX 2xx series were (and still are) horribly expensive and I don't have the motherboard or processor to take advantage of one, and the 9800GTX+ was extremely price/performance friendly, especially compared to the other available stuff on the shelf (I was in an actual physical store, as my Radeon HD 2900 was dead and I needed a graphics card then, not next week).

[publius1.livejournal.com]

I did notice the expense -- the 270 seemed to be $250 and the 290(?) was like $530 on NewEgg. Jesus.

[lightinchains.livejournal.com]

I'm sure this was very therapeutic, but there's an outside chance that sending it to NVidia might actually do some good?

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

If it was a hardware problem, all software would be flaky, not just some. As much as The Witcher and Crysis hate DX10 on this thing? Supreme Commander will run DX10 with everything maxed out and never glitch. Some DX9 software is just rock stable while others crash more often than Aeroflot. I've run all the diags I can find, and the hardware checks out.

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Oh, and this mirrors the experience I had with the last Nvidia card I bought as well. The only way to make it even remotely stable was to rearrange which PCI cards were where (this was a GeForce 2 GTS 32MB AGP card). All my ATi cards have just worked.