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STEAM incompatible with Nvidia drivers

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STEAM incompatible with Nvidia drivers

from Elemental Forums


Good Morning

I shall attempt to refrain from disdain as I go over the details of the last two weeks of video game hell.

I was having the occasional video glitch in FELH, as described in this thread: https://forums.elementalgame.com/448508/page/1/#3401597

In an attempt to fix said bug, I decided to upgrade my 8800 GT Nvidia drivers to 327.23 from the windows update, the latest windows tested set. This was perhaps the biggest mistake I ever made in the history of owning a computer. Weep for me.

To put a long story short, a complete wipe of my system was required and I even had the added hiccup 128gig winXP SP1 to overcome. Nevertheless, I prevailed, and now have an excellent version of winXP SP3 installed again. (I'll admit....I was very tempted to switch to win7 at this time....but I'd need to buy 16gigs of RAM and an SSD drive if I went that route and I just don't have the cash at the moment.) So winXP it is! Works great.

Anyways, decided load my original drivers and proceeded to play FELH. To my surpise: Video Error. Whole system locked up. Couldn't even ctrl-alt-del. Very frustrating, as I must of updated my drivers some time ago and didn't keep a copy, as I normally do. So, I proceeded to install drivers until one would work. Well....here's the list that DIDN'T work:

326.80, 326.19, 320.49, 320.18 ; all giving me the same lockup and even blue screens of death on occasion.

Google has been my friend, and I've noticed that I am not alone. Apparently Steam is having all sorts of problems with Nvidia's drivers 320.18 and up. Chalk one more reason to hate steam....as nothing else dislikes my drivers. Only Steam.

Finally I rolled back to 320.07, hoping that this time it would work. Still received the following error message in my events log:

The driver nv4_disp for the display device \Device\Video0 got stuck in an infinite loop. This usually indicates a problem with the device itself or with the device driver programming the hardware incorrectly. Please check with your hardware device vendor for any driver updates.
End of quote

and this brings me to today. Now that I have something concrete to report, I'm hoping that the SD crew can let me in on what version of Nvidia drivers I need in order to have Steam function normally.

Here is the debug.err (at least it tells you my system specs): https://www.dropbox.com/s/kyfqzvvby774jid/debug%20--%20320.07%20Video%20Error.err

Any help would be appriciated.

21,280 views 30 replies
Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

Try disabling the steam option

"Enable Steam Community In-Game" (under properties)

It could be that the overlay is taking too many resources from your system and it is causing a freeze error. Otherwise you might try to find other ways to disable the steam overlay when a game is running. I found this problem with games I played with a long long time ago and turned it off and the games ran fine.

You can set this for specific games or all the games. This basically will turn off steam when you play the game and so it will be like a "non-steam" version of the game.

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #28 from Elemental Forums Top


I haven't tried striping the game down to bear min. I'll try that.

I don't play with steam spiffs activated. All the in-game community is turned off. Cloud is turned off. Messaging is turned off.

Reply #29 from Elemental Forums Top


Good Morning

 

I'm back!

 

Santa has been good to me as my new SSD drive purrs away.

Windows 7 installation was a NIGHTMARE. However, once the updating was done, the system appears to be stable now...

Topped it off with a GeForce GT 640 ....twice as good as my old card and still guaranteed to work with my motherboard/processors.

 

Tried playing a bit of LH and it would seem that all the times my computer would freeze....no longer freeze. Yeah!

 

As a bonus, I FINALLY get to see the pedestrians. Should not of had to upgrade to 64-bit for that ... >:(  ... my machine would have run them fine. 

 

In any case, today will be a day of modding days....and then....GAME TIME!

Reply #30 from Elemental Forums Top

I love XP, (and still have it on my laptop) but went to Win7 a year ago. I run several steam games, including FE:EH. I have experienced zero problems with steam on line or off line and playing FE:EH with a mid range Nvidia graphics card. I'm no hardware or software expert, but Steam + Nvidia + Win7 operates very fine without an SSD, and with less than 12 meg ram.