monitor blacks out at certain resolutions, with new Nvidia drivers, DX8.1

[PeteS99]

hi all.
my roommate recently downloaded UT2003 to demo.. and found that he had to do some driver udpating to play.

he's running an athlon900 on an Asus A7V, with an Elsa Gladiac Geforce2 GTS 32MB, and 128 SDRAM.

first step, he downloaded and installed DirectX 8.1 . next, he got the latest drivers from Nvidia for his card. the installations went fine.. and his first run of UT2003 even went fine.

when he exited, however, things went bad. he opened Excel, and suddenly the screen (19" Accusync 95F) suddenly went out (black, vertical white line in the middle that faded out). the PC was fine, if you hit the power buitton on the monitor 2 times it comes back on.. but then craps out again, most often when opening Office apps, and IE.

I took a look last night and uninstalled the nvidia drivers, then reinstalled the latest Detonator.. found that the problem only happened at higher resolutions, equally in 16 or 32bit color.. anything over 1024x768 was a problem for it.

i also tried reinstalling the original drivers, from Elsa.. and it worked just fine (though not as fast as under the nvidia drivers) with no "monitor crashes".

right now he has the detonator drivers, DX8.1, and 1024x768 resolution. can someone explain what might be going on? i am guessing there is a driver conflict going on, and doubting that this is a hardware issue. its unlike anything i;ve seen though! thanks !!!

~p

[gladiator]

Hmmm thats weird
I could see it crashing while playing UT2003, I can only play it in the 680x400(something like that) RES. with my TNT232

But I can't see it crashing using excel??!!

[glc]

You need to install the exact monitor definition file for that monitor. Generic plug and play often won't cut it, it allows the video card to set a resolution/refresh rate that's out of range of the monitor. I've seen this with Dell monitors before.

[PeteS99]

actually its recognizing the monitor correctly... Windows 98SE, btw.

[smokealotapotimus]

Use an older detonater version. The newest ones should be used only for G3 or G4 series of cards, and even then I believe some people here reported problems with the newest detonater's on G3/4's.

[RealMaverick]

hey all....I will try the detonator idea...using the older ones I mean.......but this all happened before the detonator was DL'd....it happened after DL'ing the directX and the new Nvidia drivers....alll I wanted to do was try the unreal tournament 2003 and now I barely have my monitor up and running because of it....someone's gotta have seen this before.....help!!! what about the new nvidia drivers or directX...anyone heard of anything going wrong with those??

[RealMaverick]

ok, i couldnt find the last detonator - but i started all over with the original Elsa CD. it was still f'n up at higher resoltions though!! i noticed that it was happening in IE the most out of anything.
first thing.. i changed the Refresh rate to the lowest level.. still had some issues. ran Windows update and got anything and everything out there, including IE6SP1. upped the refresh to 75, which turns out to be the card's default.. and things are running great now - even at 1280*1024 !!

BUT... i'm going to need to update these drivers.... i'm going to check out the Elsa site. i did get the updated Elsa ones and they were still messing up, but that was on Optimal refresh and before the windows update changes...

[glc]

I still think that you may not be running the correct monitor definition file - what brand and model is the monitor?

[RJ]

I am with glc. I too had that error and it was because after the installation of the detonator driver the monitor model was changed to standard monitor or something like that, so I wasn't able to use 1024x768 anymore. By choosing the right monitor in device manager the problem got fixed.

RJ

[glc]

To expand on this - I have a customer with a Dell monitor - we set it up to use the generic Windows plug and play monitor definition and he had the same issue - blank screen with an "out of range" box in his games - we downloaded the definition file from Dell and everything was fine.