Boy oh boy, when I bought my new computer late last year, I was going to get an 8800GTS with it, but a buddy of mine talked me out of it and told me to go with the 7950 GT instead. After hearing of the early driver pains of the 8 series video cards and now this, am I ever glad I stuck to DirectX 9 tech and Windows XP. I saved a whack of cash going with the 7950 GT too. The drivers are mature and everything pretty much works as it should. Hopefully by next year I can better justify going with a DirectX 10 card.

nevermind

nvidia issuing a driver fix is as likely as snot melting the polar caps

Daamit ! I just bought a 8800 GTS 320 a week ago to replace my F***p up 6800GS. I probably deserve it for going with nVidia again.

Perhaps some journalist should take a look into those 6800GS's aswell since they all seem broken but nVidia is trying to silence it to death.
A search for DPC storms would be a good start.

I strongly suspect this is thermal throttling. My GTS 8800/320 is in a well ventilated Lian-Li case, but the thermal diode routinely shows 90+ degrees Celcius at idle, and 110-112 under load. The card does not feel that hot - the heat sink should burn my hand when I touch it, but it "feels" like abot 50 C.
I took the heat sink off, checked the contact area of the chip - it looked to have left a nice neat even imprint in the thermal interface. I replaced it with Arctic Silver 5 - made no difference. Finally I reflashed the bios and set the temperature limit up to 120 Celcius. The slowdowns went away, and so far (about 3 months) my card has survived. To test this use something like the Guru3D's Rivatuner to set the fan to 100% before you play a game.

have not had this problem with my GTX at all, had it for months now.

Remember when ATI was the one known for having crappy drivers, comparatively speaking? I work with a ton of people that still only by nvidia due to ATI's "history" with bad drivers.

Hmm...I just got an ATI card handed to me, which to use and which to ebay?

eVGA 8800 GTX vs. the ATI 2900XT, 1GB GDDR4?

Great, and this weekend I ordered an 8800GTX from the egg. >:(

I feel a little burned by this. Guess I should have gone with the ATI anyway. This will be the first geforce card I have owned since my ti4200 that was OC'd. Between then and now it has been ati all the way from 9600pros all the way up to an x1950pro agp I bought just a few months ago.

what they became aware of is that some games with nVidia cheat will default back to "normal" mode after a period of extended gameplay.

apparently the cheat to help the performance with the 8800 will "wear off" and the game will not be detected correctly for the cheat to be applied after a while.

they will resolve this issue soon enough so that all nvidia performance cheats remain in effect for the life of the gameplay.

I can definitely confirm this. It was happening recently to me in the game "Oblivion" indoors where I normally clock 100s of FPS. I dropped to around 17 and stayed there. I exited the game and rebooted then all was fine.

BTW, I own an Evga 8800GTX not a 8800GTS 320Mb.

I was playing "Oblivion" under XP SP-2. I've also seen it happen with the "Dusk" demo under Vista x64. Normally the demo will start slow and speed up. When it is bugged it starts and stays around 15FPS. When it's behaving appropriately it does about 42.

So I've seen it in Vista and XP. I dual boot and can run either OS.

Reason # 114 why I moved to 360 gaming. If you got a problem like this on a console.....so does everyone that has that console. They will find it faster and fix it faster.

Could be Vista trying to drm every file while the game is running...lol!

Remember when NVIDIA drivers were Bob-Seger-Rock-Solid?

The drivers for these cards have become a great deal more complex since the RIVA and TNT and early GeForce days.

NVIDIA drivers have never been perfect. Good, but never perfect. I'm sure in each generation we can probably remember one bug or compatibility issue.

Carmacks' comments years ago about NVIDIA being the gold standard was in reference to the drivers proper support of the API standards in OpenGL.

If the drivers fare worse on the developer side these days is an interesting question. I haven't seen discussions about that in a long time.

I've owned the 8800GTS 640 since February and have not experienced any of these problems. That's on my current DS3 mobo running a 6600 C2D (XP and then Vista) and briefly using a Biostar micro-atx board (XP) as well. Sometimes I do get this message "Vista has changed the desktop settings", something like that, but it's not a big deal. Now the only new games my 9 year-old son and I play are Supreme Commander, Flight Sim X (with SP1), Legos Star Wars II, and Tiger Woods 2007, no on-line games, plus my son plays a lot of older games e.g., Midtown Madness II and Pacific Fighters, and I've never noticed any problems or any buzzing either. Please note I'm using the most recent nvidia drivers. So the fellow that just ordered the 8800 GTX, don't panic until you try it out. These are awesome cards.

I'd be curious to see what others have experienced.

This is one of the reasons I'm not buying nVidia cards anymore. They make a good piece of hardware and then screw it up with drivers/support.

I have a Asus 8800GTX and I've never had this slowdown problem, the buzzing noise on the other hand is a HIGHLY irritating problem which has plagued most 8800GTX's since launch but has yet to be acknowledged by any of the Tier1 vendors including Nvidia.

Geez, I suspect the problem is that Nvidia misplaced their priorities in the software development.

They wasted too many resources on niche markets like SLI and forget their majority of the userbase. It doesn't help that 8xxxx family is complete different from the previous generations of their architect. They have to do a complete rewrite of everything and it isn't easy to develop solid drivers from scratch in a short time frame.

Remember when NVIDIA drivers were Bob-Seger-Rock-Solid?

Im still waiting on a driver update to fix the lack of fan speed control in Nvidia Control Panel on my 8800GTS 640MB.

dang, I was going to purchase a 8800GTS 320...

With my luck, I'll get one of the faulty cards.

I've got a 320MB 8800 GTS card.. Not experiencing this issue, YET anyway.