Which driver shouldbe better?

[yule_jie]

My laptop has a GeForce go fx 5200 card with 64m ram, and is using 77.72 driver. But when I playing the World of Warcraft, it still runs very slowly.

Whether it could be faster when I upgrade my video card driver to 80.40 or downgrade to some other versions?

Sorry for my bad English. It's really a hard work to understand my meaning. :)

Thanks.

[Bill]

Have you checked out the WOW site?

These are some helpfull pages (try in this order)

http://www.blizzard.com/support/wow/?id=aww0791p2

http://www.blizzard.com/support/wow/?id=aww0791p5

http://www.blizzard.com/support/wow/?id=aww0791p6

http://www.blizzard.com/support/wow/?id=aww0793p2

They also said to make sure you have the latest BIOS, chipset drivers, ect.

I was going to recomend the 77.72 driver, but you are running that, I think that game runs good on our destop PC with the 80.40 driver, so give it a shot too.

You should note that your card is not exceedingly fast, and neither is WOW it seems, so don't expect it to run super smooth with high detail settings, turning off some things in the in game menu should definitely help, anything related to shaders and textures/world detail should be turned down first, we turned down just a few things on our desktop PC and my cousins laptop and they both ran it fine, my cousins laptop even had intel integrated graphics, and we got the game running smoother than our desktop PC with a GF3! (desktop needs more RAM [only has 256MB], but RAMBUS 800 is way too expensive, atleast from Dell anyway)

Also make sure you close all your other programs, especially something like nortan AV. You could also try defragging.

I know this post might seem long and confusing, but I just wanted to make sure I did not miss anything.

Hope you get it running faster.

Bill

Edit: Your english is pretty good! :)

Edited July 19, 2005 by Bill

[yule_jie]

Thanks very much for your reply, Bill. It is really helpful.

I followed your suggestion, turned down some details in game, and upgraded my driver to 80.40. Then the game really could run faster than before.

But I found another problem: some objectives in the game could not be correctly displayed. They are all white colored. I think their texture is wrongly rendered. Whether the problem is caused by the new driver?

Thanks

[Bill]

It might be that driver, you should try some more of the newer ones, just remember to uninstall the 80.40 before you install anything else, as it is newer than all of the other drivers. (version wise anyway....)

I am having trouble thinking of good suggestions, but does that problem appear in the 77.72 driver?

What about the 73.40 driver? That just came out.

Could also try other 77.xx drivers.

[yule_jie]

Then I uninstalled the new driver and tried the 77.72 version, it seems no problem with the texture. But it is so strange that the game began to crash for some time.

I know a little about the usage of the inf file. Will it cause the crashing?

yu jie

[Bill]

Unless Pieter snuck some strange setting in his INF file, which is doubtful, it is not the INF but rather the driver that you are using the INF with.

Some drivers, as you should know, might always crash when you load a game no matter what INF you use.

Thankfully I do not think I have seem a driver like that in a long time, not since some of the ealy 6x.xx drivers.

Pieter did add some new settings to his recent INFs, but I would not blame them for the crashing.

*downloads and looks at Pieter's latest INF for 77.72, and the INF for 80.40*

After skimming through the INF I did not see anything that could definitely have caused it to crash (probably the driver as it is a beta after all)

Pieter if you are reading this could you care to explain somewhere what you changed/added in these new INFs since you got back?

I saw in a topic somewhere that you updated the INFs, but can't find it.... :)

Anyway yule_jie, only Pieter himself will know if there is a goof up in his latest INF version, he makes them after all. (I'm usually too stupid to notice anything if there is)

But I think that the 80.40 driver just has some kinks in it, although it runs fine as far as I'm aware on our desktop. (I have had crashes outside of games, but can not link anything to the GF card driver)

[yule_jie]

I've reinstalled the 77.72 driver on my laptop. And it seems that all the problems have been solved: no more crashes, no more texture problems. Also, it runs faster than before.

I don't know how to explain it, but, at least I could continue my game. :)

Thank you, Bill. You helped me a lot. :)

yu jie