Hi folks,

I have a Sony VAIO GRT30P (the Australian equivalent of the GRT170) with a GeForce FX Go5600.

I am having trouble with running two games and want to find out if anyone else with the same graphics chipset is having the same trouble, or if the games run fine for others.

Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide is having a problem where parts of the detail on the screen, either small polygons or parts of the user interface will flicker in and out occasionally.

The demo for Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy has a similar problem where some polygons will flicker to black and then back to being textured occasionally.  It will also freeze intermittantly for up to 30 seconds.

All other games I have tried, and there have been quite a few, have worked properly.

Can anyone who has played either of these games on a GeForce FX Go5600 tell me if they have had similar trouble of if it has worked okay for them?  Could you also tell me if there are any other web sites or forums where I might find help with this problem?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

It works fine here with 44.82 drivers or 45.23 on a GeForce FX 5650 Go

I had to disable multitexturing in game though to get certain parts to display correctly (set r_ext_multitexture "0") in the console.

That has a side effect of disabling the dynamic glow effect as well.

The sony notebook was a SiS 6xx (638 or something) chipset I think so the nforce chipset drivers will not help him.

Depending on the revision of the GeForce FX 5600 Go drivers he's using, he may bump into the same OpenGL issues several FX owners have noticed post 44.03 drivers  

Given that AFAIK most of the GeForce fx 5600 Go drivers are post 44.03, he might have a problem locating a proper set of drivers.

my recommendation : Use an .inf hack to let you install the 44.03 drivers for proper rendering.   Or live with the graphical errors for now (disabling r_ext_multitexture helps a bit) and await for newer nvidia drivers.

Hi guys, thanks for your replies so far, I really appreciate such a helpful group as this.  I have tried all driver configurations with INF hacks as neccesary including 43.xx, 44.xx, 45.xx and 51.xx.  They all display the same problems so I am back with the original and current Sony supported 43.xx drivers.

The advice about overclocking was indirectly helpful.  While I have never overclocked the graphics adapter I tried lowering the clock speed using a tweak tool.  Sure enough by lowering the clock speed and video memory speed by only 5% the game worked fine.  So this implies that Sony or nVidia have either set it too high to begin with or there is a cooling problem with the notebook.  To complicate matters I have only experienced this problem with OpenGL games and not with any DirectX applications including some pretty hefty DirectX 9 benchmarks (Aquamark 3 and 3D Mark 03).

I'd still like to hear from other users of the GeForce FX Go5600 chipset to find out if it is a common problem or not.  I'd also like to hear peoples opinions on whether it is a heating problem that warrants return of the notebook for repair/replacement or a driver problem.  Or something else altogther.

Thanks again for your help so far.

i would love to know how youv'e got your hands on the undeveloped 51.xx DetonatorFX, current release to the development/beta community is 50.84

my vaio w/fx5200 go works fine with JA last time i saw it, but it seemed to diappear with my brother ... no doubt get a phonecall saying he's borrowed it again sometimes over the next week, and i'm pretty sure it works on the nForce2 400 chipset w/AthlonMobile - i guess if yours isn't an athlon then it would be using something else, but i dont' think i've seen a single Centrio GeForce combination.

that confusion aside, why would you need to hack the inf file?
once you've installed the drivers simply goto display mode -> advanced properties -> drivers change the driver and instead of compatible chips click for all chips and then select the FX5600 (not pro) ... it should work just as well.

Thanks for your post.  I didn't know that method you described would allow me to use the other drivers, I'll have to try it next time I change them.  If you're curious about the 51.75 detonators you can find a link to them here: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/ohau-estate/mobilegpuindex.htm.  FYI the Sony VAIO GRT30P is a notebook running a Pentium 4 2.8GHz on an SiS chipset.

Can you remember what driver version you were using when you last played JA?

My Inspiron 8600 is a Centrino 1.6 + GeForce Fx Go 5650.  JKA works fine outside of the few rendering errors (fog error, a few select multitexturing problems here and there) with the default 44.82 drivers and 45.28 (both sets from DELL).

The symptoms in JKA were present in all Quake 3a powered games (see various threads regarding SOF2 fog, MOH fog, several threads could be found at guru3d.com's forums ), so odds are it's an nvidia driver problem.  In several cases the solution was to use the 44.03 drivers dated from a while back.

The reason people use hacked INF files is some driver INFs do not support a certain resolution (in my case it was 1680x1050 widescreen).   Some notebooks tend to sport 1400x1050 or so res as well which may or may not be defined in a driver's INF file.

There was a huge ruckus a while ago over the 51.75 drivers being leaked (it was leaked at or around the 15th I believe).