Tr0x Posted October 27, 2007 Report Share Posted October 27, 2007 Okay, without completely losing it and going on a really long rant about how I just bought Bioshock today and it barely works and my graphics card should be a lot better than it is.....*gasps for breath* I'm just going to put down my problem on here and see if I could get ANY help. I'm using a 2 month old Dell Inspiron 1520 with Vistax32 Premium Home Edition. Like I said, I have the Geforce 8600M GT (apparently it's top of the line but im starting to doubt it...) but I'm stuck using the driver version 101.43 which is the most up to date one on the dell website. When I found out about there being more recent drivers (in fact MUCH more recent drivers) I just about lost it. I'm already upset with Dell with a few other issues but this just tops the list with them not having remotely up-to-date drivers avaliable to download for their customers. also, the fact that nvidia wont post the mobile drivers on their site which upsets me too. Anyway, I just need a really simple answer to this: What driver would be the best to download from this site for my situation? Before telling me this is a really stupid question and to go "look at the help forum for the 8xxxM cards" I'll tell you I've already done that. So far, I've tried the 158.45 AND the 163.44 drivers as recomended but both of them only make the bioshock screen move far to the left and then the game crashes and now Guildwars is completely screwy and I'll need to uninstal it. I've rolled back the drivers to the 101.43 but I just cant live with the shoddy performance of it anymore (battlefield 2142 is in a sad state and running with lower performance than my 4 year old computer). Just tell me what driver I need and if you would be so kind to tell me what I might be doing wrong I'd greatly appreciate it. I know this post was lengthy but I REALLY need help or I'm going to have to return bioshock which will make me sad :) Thanks (and yes I'm obviously a huge n00b to this site so be gentle) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Semeonor Posted October 27, 2007 Report Share Posted October 27, 2007 I have a dell 1520 of almost the exact same specs ( 8600mgt, 2.0 ghz processor, 2 gigs of ram) and i found it really lame when i got my laptop in august to find out there arent' any updated drivers for it. This basic driver sucks arse but i've been to the site and wasn't able to play bioshock until i got a desktop driver from here (bioshock doesn't recognize that lame arse driver built in from dell and repeatdly crashes) since then i've been using driver 163.44 and i've been able to play bioshock and all the other games i play are 10 times more stable than they was with that crap driver (halo 1 and 2, enter the matrix path of neo, bioshock, counter strike, resident evil 4, FEAR) So actually i've seen the 163.44 driver works best but i'm about to move on to the new driver for the crysis demo cause i've heard of some increased performance there so maybe you should try that one too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Posted October 27, 2007 Report Share Posted October 27, 2007 For starters a single 8600M GT is not a top of the line graphics card, it is more of a midrange card. (8700M/8800M GT or desktop 8800s would be top of the line, or an SLI setup) Whoever told you it was top of the line is talking a bunch of bull****. Even 2 months ago we knew about the 8700M/8800M GT cards. Second why are you surprised Dell does not have up to date graphics card drivers? Dell and well, pretty much every other laptop manufacturer have out of date drivers, that is why this site exists. Even if you buy Alienware, Sager, Asus, Toshiba, Clevo, ect they will all have out of date drivers, most WORSE than dell. For example a laptop that I ordered this month will probably ship with 94 series drivers. Also the drivers skipped a large range when they went from 10x.xx series to 155.xx and above series. The 15x.xx are only a few months newer than that 101 driver. You also shouldn't give up after only trying 2 drivers, thats just sad. There is also 163.75, 163.76, 156.73 laptop WHQL, and lots of other new ones. There is also the fact that your dumb vista OS is causing the game to run slowly, you might need over 1.5 GB of ram to run that smoothly under vista. The game would probably run nice with 1 GB of ram on XP though. If you are feeling adventurous you can try this driver too. http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/index....showtopic=15710 Try those and make sure you have over a GB of ram then come complain about speed if it isn't fixed yet. Make sure you uninstall your drivers first and use the modified INFs if you haven't yet somehow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tr0x Posted October 27, 2007 Author Report Share Posted October 27, 2007 thanks for the tips so far. I'll give the 163.44 driver another shot since it sounds so promising. I have the exact same specs as that guest who first posted (8600m gt, 2.0 ghz processor, 2 gigs of ram) so clearly it isnt a hardware or ram issue. Im glad to hear its not just me whos been having this problem. As for Dell: Even if other companies are still including out of date drivers, that doesnt make it right and the very least that dell could do would to appear as if they're trying to put new drivers on their page. as of now, they've done nothing to advertise new drivers or the fact that their drivers "suck arse". Anyway, when I tried installing either of the drivers from here, I did include the modded INFs but I didn't uninstall the old driver. I guess I was just worried that I wouldn't be able to roll back if the new driver sucked (I've rolled back to the dell driver twice now since the two drivers from here havnt worked out so far.) And I'm NOT giving up after just 2 drivers, I just needed some suggestions. I'll post back with more "complaints" if I cant get some more drivers to work but this time. I just need to be sure that uninstalling the current (but crappy) dell driver wont kill my computer. I dont have much experience with this sort of stuff so please offer some suggestions if you have them. I'll reply shortly after trying out the recomended drivers again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neomax Posted October 28, 2007 Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 I faced the same issues you faced and was worried for quite sometime... i have the same card and i used 163.xx ... All issues have been ironed out so far... Going to try out the ones suggested above... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Posted October 28, 2007 Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 It won't mess up your computer Trox, windows will load a simple VGA driver till you install a new graphics card driver. Between driver installations you will lose most of the graphics functionality though. After uninstalling you can always go back and install the dell drivers. You especially need to uninstall when downgrading. Not uninstalling first can sometimes cause BSODs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tr0x Posted October 28, 2007 Author Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 (edited) huray! I installed the 163.44 driver (after uninstalling the dell one) and bioshock works GREAT! My only issue is that if I try to run it in 1440x900 resolution, it minimizes to a window and its sort of laggy. Right now I've turned the resolution down but its really not an issue (even if the sides of my screen arent being used). I've just checked out battlefield 2142 to compare and its having a similar problem. Unfortunately, since there arent any wide screen resolutions avaliable, the game is stuck with the sides of the screen becoming unusable. Using the Dell driver, the entire screen was used for any game under any resolution. Is there a way to fix this? It's just sort of annoying (especialy in bf2142 where it seems like half my screen isnt even used) Also, I just wanted to thank those of you who made the suggestions and put up with me. If anyone has a suggestion on how to fix my (new) problem, please post it here. Edited October 28, 2007 by Tr0x Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
colsaunders2 Posted October 28, 2007 Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 As for changing the display scaling, you can do that in the NVIDIA Control Panel (Display -> Change flat panel scaling). If you're inclined to try some more drivers, I had a better experience using 163.75, and now 169.01 :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest michael Posted October 28, 2007 Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 hey trox. i have the same system as you except for having 3gb of ram. same graphics card though. dell driver didn't work for bioshock for me either. it kept crashing after the plane crash. i downloaded driver v. 163.69 from this site and now it works fine. my system isnt quite good enough to run bioshock at full settings and at 1440 * 900 (its a little jumpy) so i lowered the res. make sure you select a res that has the same aspect ratio (16:10). to make sure of that just divide the first number by the second and make sure it equals 1.6 (e.g 1440/900 = 1.6). that way the whole screen will be used instead of the sides not being used. if the game puts minmises into a window for some reason just hit alt+enter once or twice. sometimes mine starts in a small window for some reason as well so i hit alt+enter to put in into window mode then alt+enter again to get it back into full screen. thank god for this site though. i can't believe dell aren't more up to date with the drivers offered! and by the sounds of it a lot of laptop manufacturers are the same. laptops these days are being advertised as being games capable so you'd think they'd support gamers but they still have the old school support attitude that laptops aren't for gamers even though they are advertising them as game capable! which mind you they completely are. bioshock does run very well on my inspiron 1520 as does flight simulator x. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natural_orange Posted October 28, 2007 Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 You need to Disable Direct X 10 and launch the game in direct x 9 mode by adding "-dx9" without qoutes after the qoutes in the shortcut. That will make the program run. I have the 8600m gs and i have problems playing BioShock. Now that I have updated the drivers I am having a bunch of other problems Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Nlight19 Posted October 28, 2007 Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 Hey i want to know, for my case, i can't even install those drivers because when i try to install, i have a message telling me that "Nvidia setup Could not locate any drivesr that are compative with your current hardware, set up will now exit". Anybody can help??? Thx!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natural_orange Posted October 28, 2007 Report Share Posted October 28, 2007 Read: http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/index.php?showtopic=9243 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest lasonovich Posted November 14, 2007 Report Share Posted November 14, 2007 I've been playing bioshock a bit using 8600m GT and to get it working you need to ensure you have latest direct x drivers. So go to microsoft and get those first. Runs pretty smooth at 1200x800 or at higher resolutions if AA turned off. You don't need to run it in direct x 9 mode you just need to update direct x drivers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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