Originally Posted by Zimbwar

Well that gives me hope. I've been in agony since 2.0 came out. I've posted on nVidia's forums, and WoW's quite a few times. I've been building and diagnosing computers for 13 years now and this problem has stumped me hard.

- Tried every set of drivers available for my card (removing in safe mode)
- No Viruses or Spyware of any kind
- Removed and re-installed WoW
- No mods loaded
- Tried with just about every combination of startup (no apps, just hardware apps, etc...)
- Changed about every setting in the nVidia control panel & WoW
- Checked card for any damage (none found, and fan works fine)
- Temperature stays well within safe limits, and removing cover from tower makes no difference in stability

But what started in WoW has now spread across other areas. When 2.0 came out I started getting bad flickering and texture glitches. Then when BC came out I started freezing. At first it was non-stop, then it mellowed out for a while. I managed to crawl my way to 70 but shortly after it became worse again. Now if I want to play I have to hit Start immediately when I launch (the logins screen can freeze me), login real quick, hit Start again. Load my toon, and then hit Start as soon as I get into game. At this point I'm usually stable enough to play for a while.

Like I said, though, its worse now than it was. Now any Direct3D app will freeze with a "nv4_disp has caused an infinite loop" BSoD. Tried AoE3, Half Life 2, Supreme Commander. I can even get it loading the WoW:BC cinematic. What's more obnoxious is the artifacting, though. I get what appear to be dead pixels randomly on my screen. I know its not the monitor since they don't stay in the same place. I get them booting up, in BIOS, if I run command prompt full screen, etc... I also get them popping up in DVD movies if I watch closely, but they come and go. What's nice is that when I scroll they streak down my screen creating blue and green lines across web-sites. Interestingly, the top-right area is the worst, and sometimes I get flickering in bland colored skies (like the gray in Terrokar). If I let it flicker enough I'll crash.

Anyway, nVidia hasn't released new drivers since November 2nd and some of the posts talking about this go back to 2003 (the infinite loops, etc..). So its a problem that has been around but for whatever reason is showing up more and more frequently with people playing WoW:BC. Blizzard of course would never openly admit to any known issue that could cause problems outside of game. I know software damaging hardware is a laughable idea, but its entirely possible that the cards are not damaged, but simply not working correctly because of bugs + "instruction that was supposed to be available to devs".

I got an RMA for mine (which was from XFX, via Newegg). But the company has a crappy policy of making the user return the card first (on their dime) and of course it has to make it there w/o any damage or that voids the warranty. After that they test the card to verify a problem, and if they aren't lazy they'll send me a replacement. Unfortunately this leaves me w/o a computer as I have no extra PCI / PCI Express cards, no onboard video, and no AGP slot on my mobo. Yay.

And if anyone actually reads all this, here's my specs.

Intel Conroe Core 2 Duo 6600
Asus P5B Deluxe w/ WiFi
XFX 7900GT 256mb
4gb Corsair

Heh...I even tried the new beta release drivers...with the same result. What I don't know is whether my nVidia card has deteriorated somehow over time (about 9 months old) or whether it is strictly a driver/software issue.

So far my ATI x1950xt is stable, though noisier (stock fan) than the nVidia and with a lower frame rate vs the ASUS nVidia 7900GTX.