Nvidia driver versions

Hopefully someone here can either help or point me in the right direction to get help!

As a few may remember from prior posts, I have a custom JOGL volume renderer that we run as part of our software on our medical consoles (my company’s actual product). I’m having some issues with various Nvidia drivers, and hoping to address them before it becomes a major problem. Basically, I spent a lot of time tweaking as much performance out of it as I could, and eliminating various volume-edge artifacts and such from my rendering. I thought all was well, but then i got complaints of ugly artifacts and bad framerates… so I looked and they had used a newer Nvidia (we only use Nvidia hardware for arbitrary administrative reasons ::); I’m no ATI fanboi, but I voted for at least trying them out; anyhow…) driver.

It turns out that while my renderer runs like a champ on version 84.21 (which was the state of the art new hotness at the time i finished the renderer initially), under every newer driver version I’ve tried since then, it runs like cold molasses, and half of my ugly edge artifacts reappear. Has anyone experienced any similar issues? Perhaps my renderer became accidentally reliant on a bug that got fixed or something? I’ve been completely unable to deduce what’s so magical about 84.21. So far it’s not an issue… I just tell our field guys for now to always load 84.21, regardless of their exact hardware. But of course sooner or later someone will buy a new board that 84.21 doesn’t recognize; at which point i’m officially without a paddle.

I’ve scoured over the release notes for every version I’ve tried, and can’t seem to find any listed bugfixes or changes that relate to my problem. Does anyone know where to find an Nvidia-specific forum where I might go for more detailed help of this sort?

NVidia removed their developer forums a while back and as far as I know the only forums they now host are related to SLI and Gelato. You may be able to find more specific OpenGL help on the forums on opengl.org.

However just based on your post it sounds to me like you need to do more debugging of your problem to narrow down what is going on. Once you do so you’ll be in a better position to file bugs against NVidia’s drivers if they turn out to be the root cause of the problem and not something you’re doing out of bounds of the OpenGL spec.