video issues
Hi All,
I have followed the procedure to get the 64bit Nvidia drivers working in Vista under bootcamp. I can get the drivers to install, and I get Areo working, my performance in games is horrible. Half Life 2, which should run fine on this hardware drops frames and cannot be played, and I won't even mention Crysis. I know this isn't the fastest video card around, but it should handle HF2 without any issues. I also get some strange anomalies when playing back video as well.
The reason the Nvidia drivers do not pick up the video card is that Apple is using the laptop version of this chip, and Nvidia does not provide drivers directly for their mobile hardware because OEM can tweak the chips to their exact specifications for laptops. I had an old Dell with an Nvidia chip, and again I had to get the drivers from Dell.
I am assuming Apple chose to use the Mobile version of the chip due to heat issues and what not.
From Wikipedia:
The 8800 GS has 96 stream processors and 384 MB of RAM and 192 bit memory. In May 2008, it was rebranded as the 9600 GSO in an attempt to spur sales.
On April 28 2008, Apple announced an updated iMac line featuring an 8800 GS with 512MB of video memory. However, the card is actually a rebranded NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTS. It features up to 512 MB of 800 MHz GDDR3 video memory, 64 unified stream processors, a 500 MHz core speed, a 256-bit memory bus width, and a 1250 MHz shader clock.
It sucks that they are using a mobile version of the chip and you lose 32 stream processors.
Anyways I might go back to 32bit Vista. There is really no reason other than Crysis to run 64bit right now. Hopefully Apple will correct this issue soon.
-Marek
