Arg. Thats what i can say
i recently baught a new rig(in sig), how little did i know that some thing will crawl ;\

I was reading benchmarks over the games, and i was really shocked by some very low n some very high scores, and i was wondering... wtf...
so i started to chk it on my own.
BnW2: Although runs at more or less the same speed, has graphic anomolys under the 78, 81.84/5 fixes it completly n makes it run fairly well.
F.e.A.r: god, how many problems for one game, anything under the 80, runs like crap, really, i mean with an avg of 30 fps or so for 1024 w/4aa/16af...
going to 81.84, turning vsync off! (a must! dunno why), jumps to almost 60!? with soft shadows on... but, transperent and gamma AA lowers fps to less than 30.
going to 81.85 fixes more or less everything and makes it run great no matter what gfx option is on, BUT!
quake4: i was playing it, and i was thinking, ... hmm, this should work faster! so weird, under the 81.85 this game moves at half the fps, no matter what you do, even deleteing the profile with nhancer, going to 78.01 and i can play it @ X16aa/X16AF on 1024 with an almost 60 fps avrage, (btw, beraly got that avg on 1024 X4@ high settings in game).
another thing, q4's ultra settings works very fast on the gtx, getting same fpses more or less, but, i get a lot of slow downs, almost every new area, i guess its texture loading, so i went back to high, really does need a 512 card i guess...
so, first of all, DIE NVIDIA!

second of all, choose your driver based on the game you play, as for me, i think im gonna do a lot of restarts and driver installs... "shrugs".

I would not point that much on nVidia ...
you got to differ between the games ...
games like BetaField 2 are one of the worst coded ever
you just have to look at very well coded application which never do make trouble
for example Warcraft 3 never made any trouble equal what version I did use ...
Unreal Tournament runs perfectly with any version AND more important ...
show me a game running on a Riva TNT 2 there are nearly no games that will function ...
but UT2004 does - OK it does look very ugly but it is playable - that is good code
Or lets take BnW 2 one of the latest drivers had BnW2 named in changelog but how could it be that nV has to fix game problems ??? I mean how many games do run perfectly but the devs of BnW2 are not able to make it run without a driverupdate ????
You also have to look at the incredible amount of games developed for consoles lately and their ports for the PC ... in most cases they do suck extremely ... you can not port a console game to PC the way it is actually done - where money is the only point

if you do look at REAL games those who survived years you will notice that those games do have very few problems with PC hardware ... look at Warcratf 2 for example this game is about 10 years old and runs like the first day released ...

you clearly have to differ between games written to make big money in the shortest possible time or REAL games which nearly never do any problem and survive for years

ah, cough, q4, fear, BnW, i can name more games but it wont matter (aka Far Cry).
ofcourse the game coders are in blame, i mean, even fear had a patch on the day its out, BnW too, and i believe q4 will have within this week :|
But, after seeing profile changes and things like vsync changes a whole game performance, im not that sure its only them, and if nvidia takes out a driver for each new game than maybe they just have a fundemental driver bug, cause if this goes on i really have to reinstall drivers for each game, its a joke...
and trust me, the diffreneces between the fps on the diff drivers is freaking huge, im talking X2, comeon, something seriously fucked up here.

you are indeed right in some cases
but its not good to generalise it
Another example here is NFSU2 I had some trouble with the 70 series which differs from driver to driver BUT
Any other game I play or others do play work perfectly
now I hardly believe nVidia messes around but NFS U2 is just bad coded ... it works for a special situation and as soon as you change something it starts having problem .... while any other game works perfectly

I mean things like the stupid "bug" with the overlay brightness was really LOL and nV is to blame for that ... but I think nV AND ATi have to fix very much things game devs have done wrong

I just remember past time when Internet was somekind of luxury ... nearly every game did work out-of-the-box ... that was absolutly normal ....today its normal to check the website first and download this patches which sometimes have the size of half of the game itself. And if some profile settings do make problems its much more likely that the game has trouble with one of the settings you are able to set in the driver.

One more thing are those graphics demos - from farbrausch e.g. - they are 64kB in size with lots of stuff inside and you kinda wonder how they get that - but they work ... its pretty much equal which driver you use they just do work .... because they are very carefully designed.

we recently had some talk about software engineering in school and only about 16% of all projects are succesful while 50% need much more money to be realised
That kinda reflects the actual gaming scene

making money is everythign that counts and that leads to let the user do the beta testing and reduce support to the minimum you have to do
resulting in massive problems others have to fix ... both nV and Ati with their driver in order not to fall behind the competitor

Things like "die nV" are unneccessary in my eyes

total agree with Mertsch.

I totally Agree with you aswell, and i think there is a little uprise about it lately, there were 2 articles i read about the "patching" n the game industry, one was linked here, dont rememeber what site.
in the end, i just say this :|
fear,BnW -> 81.85
q4, Farcry -> 78...

this is a damn hard dilema!

to be honest, i dont care downloading a patch, 500 mb or what ever, its annoying but i dont care. but they dont upload patches, and even if they do, its usually a gameplay fix or something, rarly its an engine/code/whatever fix...

i've stopped buying games after HL2, and i think im making the right choice, though it sucks.

I don't care about the size of patches, too
But its a huge difference between Patches you have to apply in order to run the game and patches who do some balance changes, add new features, or fix bugs that may appear with (just an example: a windows update (I haver had such a situation)
In situation like Bet on Soldiers where a patch of 800MB in size is released before the game is out ... I do give a shit about it ... I will not even look at the case when I am going through a store
thank god there are some games that do make so much fun, that you can always go back to 'em
LOL week ago I played Blueshift once again

heh, just got the 81.85 whql, apperantly thats diff now everything works ok, atleast for now ;] or till a new game is out :|