Hi all just wanted to let those of you who don't already know you can find some pretty stable Nvidia drivers out there that will allow you to use GLSL (At least on a 5900 FX Ultra they are stable). I have been trying them out since the 61.21 beta drivers came out and this is by far the best one yet. All of the default shaders that come with typhoon labs shader designer work except 2 which both use for loops to generate fractals. I'm guessing the beta drivers don't allow loops yet but everything else looks great. For you all itching to try out GLSL on Nvidia cards and aren't registered NV developers you can find the beta drivers for 61.71 here: http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=807 The typhoon labs shader designer can be found here: http://www.typhoonlabs.com/ Cheers

The problem is that wether they work or not varies, for me for example, none of the 6x.xx have worked without problems, for example, with any 6x.xx driver installed, after about 5 minutes of playing some UT2K4 or any other 3D game for that matter, the comp freezes for about 20 secs and i get a heck load of graphic "corruption" (hard to define, if anyone wants, i can get a screenie). I understand they are beta, but it's a bit weird that so far it happens with all of them.

I probably should have been a little more specific in my reply. I was writing more from the position of a coder not a gamer. I just wanted to let folks know that you can use GLSL now somewhat reliably in your own code with the 61.71 drivers. At least on 5900 FX cards you can. Of course there are always problems with beta drivers and there are still a few issues with the Nvidia drivers as well regarding GLSL. Namely no support for: loops, inverse/transpose built in matrix states. So far those are the only things I have noticed that do not have support but I'm sure there will be more. However the functionality for loading/compiling/linking and running shaders seems really good so far with my own code.

As far as 3D games I haven't noticed any problems with any of my games but most of the games that I have are a little older. Homeworld, Warcraft3, Sacrifice, Diablo, Diablo II, UT, just to name a few. Not too sure what you mean by corruption but I would like to see a shot if its not too much trouble.

- Cheers

Well, atm i only have this bad example, i can get some better ones though.
Anyway, here's a pic from the KOTOR menu, look at the gfx "corruption" on the character to the left of the menu. That happens in any 3d scene. Now image a 3d scene with around 30k - 60k polies, like the UT2K4 scenes and you get an idea of how annoying it is.
Pic

This doesn't get fixed unless i restart the comp, and even then, it's just a matter of time.

But yes, i supose if you don't have any problem with the 6x.xx drivers, they are a good set of drivers. Otherwise and if you want to mess with GLSL, i recommend the 56.68 drivers on the nVidia Developer site, in the nVidia SDK area.

The dev driver's haven't been behaving well for me, either. Everytime the CPU or harddrive load on my system gets high, my mouse gets very unresponsive. In addition, it will randomly stall during CounterStrike and other games.