Trouble with the ForceWare driver

[Filius]

Hello, I've got some nasty driver problem around here. Some time ago I upgraded from series 80 of ForceWare drivers to the latest 91.31. After that most older games stopped working - crash with the error at startup saying that there is no 3D acceleration available! The funny thing is that all new games still work fine. I also checked DirectX via dxdiag, and under Display -> DirectX Features it says:

DirectDraw Acceleration: Not available
Direct3D Acceleration: Enabled (!)
AGP Texture Acceleration: Not available

I have tried everything I know of - reinstalled many different ForceWare versions (series 70, 80, latest 90 and so on). Installations always work fine, but the under DX the above stated remains. I have also reinstalled nForce drivers several times. DirectX install reports that everything is fine, so one can't reinstall.

System: Athlon XP 3000+ on nForce 2, GeForce 6800 GT on 8x AGP, Windows XP Pro with SP2.

Ideas? I really don't know what else to do to fix this...

[rudedog]

How are you uninstalling your old drivers before the reinstall?

You really should use drivercleaner to remove old Nvida/ATI drivers before installing new drivers. In most cases this fixes 95% of the issues people have with video card drivers. Why they don't include this themselves is beyond my comprehension.

Good luck

[Filius]

I have already used DriveCleaner, and, as I see it, it cleaned the drivers - I have successfully done several clean driver installation of both ForceWare and nForce drivers without any reported failures. The problem still remains.

[doddsy]

no agp texture acceleration ......mmmmmm

chipset drivers needed maybe.

[nekrosoft13]

yap, he is missing the chipset drivers, especially the agp driver.

[Filius]

What precisely am I missing? I have successfully reinstalled the latest nForce 2 drivers for Windows XP without that helping.

ADD: I have now also reinstalled Windows, but the problem remains.

[Filius]

I didn't get much help here, but I finally found a solution to this problem, so I'll post it in a case someone will get a similar one some time later.

Display proporties -> Settings -> Advanced -> Troubleshoot

There there is a button - "Enable write combining". Deactivating that, restarting, and then reactivating, and restarting, fixed my problem. And that works with the latest (91.47) drivers.

Microsoft also discribes my problem, and have tons of other solutions. Found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/191660/en-us