Nvidia still working on 8800 texture slowdowns

IT SEEMS THAT Nvidia's Geforce 8800 series of graphics cards suffers random slowdowns, and this can be particularly problematic for owners of the Geforce 8800GTS 320MB, the cheapest 8800 out there.

The problem lies in fact that the G80 GPU has some trouble with texture memory management. In many unrelated cases, this bug starts leaving textures in video memory and system memory, causing the board to run out of texture memory. Once you run out of memory for textures on your graphics card and system, you will experience a lot of swapping with textures on a hard drive, and that is recipe for disaster, at least as far as framerates are concerned.

Some games are more affected than others, it all depends on how the game engine is handling textures. We learned about the situation a while ago, but it has been two weeks and fix is still not out. We heard from Nvidia that testing is well under way, with both Windows XP and Vista - combining these operating systems with different GPUs.

For now, if you experience slowdowns in games and you own GeForce 8800 series card, you can do the alt+tab trick, also known as "switch windows to force texture reload" fix. µ