Just wanted to know if anyone else had issues with Bioshock Demo on Vista using a 8800 ultra?

I downloaded the latest beta drivers from nvidia as suggested and when it crashes, Vista says my nvidia drivers stopped responding.

I bought the game and I hope when I get home from work today that I dont have the same problem with it. I am thinking of uninstalling the drivers and going with the non beta.

Help!!!!

I am having the same issue with the demo and the non-beta nvidia drivers on my 8800GTX. The game won't even start. I see the bio shock splash screen then the monitor goes dark like the game is about to load, then nothing happens...

Mine loads and plays fine and then randomly stops and vista says video driver is not responding. The game takes me back to the desktop while the sound and games seems to still be playing but no video.

to julest and rayzor , what drivers are u using ? and also vista 64 or 32 ?

vista 32-bit and the latest beta drivers that were recommended. 163.44

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=41827

I get the same thing on my 8800 gts 320MB. The first time I tried it I just got a black screen and had to reboot; the second time it just gave me the Bioshock.exe has stopped responding message.

I have the latest 163.44 drivers and the Steam version of the demo on Vista 32 bit.

crap, that article doesnt help because I have that version of the driver. Vista just stinks, that is the problem.

I am using the fileplanet version of the bioshock and I haven't tried my full steam version yet since we still have a few hours for activation.

If I go to play the full version and it does this, I will not furious! What does the beta driver give? If it is just performance then I will uninstall and go back to the latest non beta because I can't go without play all night tonight.

Sure glad my Geforce 6800 GT runs it, although, not exactly smoothly with the settings on high.

Have you guys gotten that patch that anandtech reviewed about a week ago? It is a patch to chill the memory usage by windows when using high end cards. I can't remember all the tech specs buy you should all install that. You all have a big card with lots of memory and it really depends on the rest of your system. Microsoft has hidden this patch and is not making it easy to get. Go check anandtech.com and find the patch. It is something in there about a hotfix. It was call hotfix ........ whatever those numbers are and I just woke up and am lazy so you need to go find it yourselves but that seems to be the problem. You 2 gigers on vista 32 with a GTX definitly will run into problems without this patch. Probably is everyone's problem here because usuage was getting worse as time went on; I'm not as sure about you people who crash right away. Don't know enough about your configs.


In my ramblings I forgot to mention it was something microsuck released a few weeks ago or a week ago: something like that. Anyhow, find out that patch. Its not your graphics driver either. It is something to do with vista's memory usage, like your system mem. I don't want to give specs on it cause I don't remember at all but it sounds like the exact same problem. Good luck guys

I do remember two patches being release a couple weeks ago, and you can very well be right. I will definately try that when I get home. I just built this rig and I would be very unhappy if I had problems. And yes Vista is crap and I wouldn't use it if it wasnt for DX10.

I have both of those patches and I still get this crap. Just a black screen when I try to run it and I have to press the power button on my computer, at which point windows shuts down properly like nothing is wrong.

Also my gts only has 320MB of VRAM, so memory usage is likely not the culprit. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Full specs:
Athlon 64 X2 3800+ @2.5GHz
2GB DDR-400 @208MHz 2.5-3-3-7-T2
eVGA 8800gts 320MB @ 600/900
Cheapo sound card
120GB Western Digital HDD
BenQ DVD burner
Memorex CD burner
XCLIO Goodpower 500W
Vista x86

You talking about performance patch

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads [...] laylang=en

Well mine plays but then goes back to the desktop and says video driver not responding and the game is still running with the sound but no video of the game just the desktop which still responds. I can actually end the task and run again

Does anyone have an 8800 and Vista without any problems in the game?

That one and another one that helps with memory usage. I got them both before they were made publicly available, maybe there's a newer version out now?