NV's Big Bang II/180.xx Driver Thread

[Kursah]

Well not too much is known, but it may help to get a new thread going for it. I do know it's supposed to optimize some goodies, fix SLI w/multimonitor support and be here this month and last until approx Feb of 2009. What do you think the 180 series of drivers will bring to the table? Are you excited?

Personally I'm content with 177 drivers for the most part, but I'm very interested in seeing what the 180s bring to the table and if the few promises are kept with these releases. Also seeing if there's any more performance to be extracted from drivers for my GTX260 .

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=66660&highlight=Big+Bang

We've all read this news post, but just to kind of reiterate what may be happening sooner than later. Will it be released as another sort of Power Pack deal like what was done with PhysX? Who knows! We'll find out soon enough!



ATTENTION: Please keep the flaming and crap out of this thread, there's been enough BS in the forums lately, don't bring it here! This thread is for talking about 180 series of drivers, NV GPU's, providing links to them, performance results and so forth. If you can't handle that, find a different thread to pollute or walk away from the PC and find something better to do.

I felt it was necessary to post this notice in threads like this anymore because of a few users that choose to instigate in a variety of topics, if you don't have results, questions, ideas, or something constructive that is ON TOPIC, please keep it out of here, no sense in getting infractions/banned for being immature.

 

[OzzmanFloyd120]

The 177 drivers have been so amazing that I don't see how they have any room to improve again so quickly. I give props to the green boys for their amazing driver work as of late.

 

[Solaris17]

I personally cant wait until these drivers come out im going to be soooo ciked

 

[OzzmanFloyd120]

Does anybody know the official release date yet?

 

[Cold Storm]

The Date is sometime this month... Some saw it is the 18th... SO, anytime now.

 

[3870x2]

every driver update so far has disappointed me, there is only one thing i could care about in the next update: multi gpu support, 2x+ gpu just doesnt scale, im not saying it doesnt scale good, im saying it doesnt scale at all.
if you are running 4xGTX280s, and still doesnt match the performance that, theoretically 2xGTX260s should bring in performance, it doesnt give me much reason to go SLI, or crossfire for that matter. Before, SLI used to mean Scan Line Interleave. What happened here, is one graphic card ran the top half of the screen, the second the bottom, very easy, and the performance gain was close to +80%, usually higher. Nvidia bought out SLI, renamed it Scalable Link Interface. 3DFX had the right idea, Nvidia brings it to shame....
Im not going to pretend to know the complications of drivers, or firmware, for multiple GPUs, so im not flaming the company, but are they atleast trying? if anyone can add to my knowledge on this please do so.

 

[OzzmanFloyd120]

every driver update so far has disappointed me, there is only one thing i could care about in the next update: multi gpu support, 2x+ gpu just doesnt scale, im not saying it doesnt scale good, im saying it doesnt scale at all.
if you are running 4xGTX280s, and still doesnt match the performance that, theoretically 2xGTX260s should bring in performance, it doesnt give me much reason to go SLI, or crossfire for that matter. Before, SLI used to mean Scan Line Interleave. What happened here, is one graphic card ran the top half of the screen, the second the bottom, very easy, and the performance gain was close to +80%, usually higher. Nvidia bought out SLI, renamed it Scalable Link Interface. 3DFX had the right idea, Nvidia brings it to shame....
Im not going to pretend to know the complications of drivers, or firmware, for multiple GPUs, so im not flaming the company, but are they atleast trying? if anyone can add to my knowledge on this please do so.

Hmm, I get major scaling with my 9600s, but then again nv's big bad gpus aren't known for scaling as well as their mid-range gpus. Look at how crap-tastic the 7950GX2 was, however two 8600GTs ate it for lunch.

 

[Kursah]

I wouldn't say NV has failed like Ozz said, the mid-range cards scale very well, with the 9600's scaling extremely well...why the higher end cards don't...is hard saying. I hope the 180 series helps with that, and maybe there's not enough to fully use both of them? I dunno...SLI/Dual+ GPU's doesn't interest me, I like one GPU/one card for my gaming, keeps it simpler, easier and with my GTX260, I've got plenty of power for my gaming needs.

But if there's more to be had for driver performance beyond the 177 series I'm all open for it, the 177 series have done a great job and had the introduction of officially supported PhysX, which will hopefully be more useful than gimmick in the future. Even if not, oh well...my gaming performance is great and I look forward to the future of NV's drivers. And hopefully sooner than later we'll start seeing these drivers officially released and rockin our socks off!

 

[r9]

Hey you get it all wrong. The Big bang has some thing with the partical accelerator maybe if you have 3x sli first is for graphic second for physx and third one for time travel .
Or maybe nvidia was expecting black hole to appear and to swallow earth and they would never had to publish 180 drivers

 

[OzzmanFloyd120]

Hey you get it all wrong. The Big bang has some thing with the partical accelerator maybe if you have 3x sli first is for graphic second for physx and third one for time travel .
Or maybe nvidia was expecting black hole to appear and to swallow earth and they would never had to publish 180 drivers

You what you're saying is that nVidia is behind the Large Hadron Collider? Those sons of bitches!?

 

[Cold Storm]

That wouldn't be hard to think about... but do we even know what the specs of the computers are even? Would they even tell us? I think since it's government.. its ATI... but that's me... That's just me...

 

[kid41212003]

I think I read about it will be "Multi-thread optimized". And this is what I expected most.

 

[Kursah]

I think each NV GPU should have a mini-Caldron Collider, pwnage powa!

Keep the thoughts coming guys! I'm sure someone's gonna find a beta or some new news about this!

 

[Mussels]

my opinion is that its an official launch of the physx software. until now its been kinda beta, and rather buggy (as several threads show, XP gets better physx power than vista, SLI is slower than single cards, and using a dedicated card for physx overall sucks.)

Methinks it'll just be final physx drivers, with the above bugs fixed.

 

[Cold Storm]

Yeah, that sounds about right, the rights to hit SLI with Physx and maybe helping out Tri and Quad sli... If they say quad then I will be going back to get two Gx2's... I gave that up because of talking with people and how hard it is to work with 4 Chips...

 

[Kursah]

I think that they should have a mode that uses both cards for graphics and physx, depending on the load needed. Really if one card can do both, why not have two cards do both? I'm sure it'd get complicated tho, and may sound like a sloppy way of doing it, but I bet it'd work and if they get SLI free'd up, why not bog it down a little more with actual work?

 

[Mussels]

as i postulated in another thread, atm it seems like they're locking a certain %age of the cards to do physx. This % is a bit higher in XP, thus the better scores in XP in physx benchmarks, however it doesnt raise or lower when in SLI or running a standalone card (aka 8800GT+8500GT) - these drivers should add the option for 100% of a secondary card to do physx, and hopefully they'll have a 'non VGA' driver to allow it to work with ATI video cards in vista.

 

[OzzmanFloyd120]

I know this is a little off-topic, but I just did a DMC4 bench with the newest forcewares and I just came within spitting distance of Live Or Die with his GTX280... is this the crazy new drivers doing this or did I Just hit a golden spot?

 

[Mussels]

i dunno ozz, its not impossible for them to be testing these things. They could well be optimising drivers all around.

 

[erocker]

I'm very much hoping that somewhere in Big Bang II, there is a way to make a Nvidia card run as a stand-alone physx processor for Vista. That would make my day.

 

[Cold Storm]

Wow, didn't even think of that... It could poss. happen.. They do have Ageia...
That would make my day also!