A new video driver is out from nVidia. The previous good one or at least one that worked for me was 301.42. Development for this new one has taken longer than usual for whatever reasons. But it is here now.
My nVidia 306.23 install is working with Second Life. No pink textures, which some nVidia users were starting to see. Pink textures are caused by the video card and the viewer getting out of sync on which textures are which. When the viewer can’t get a texture to display, it shows the texture as pink. So, while the problem is in the video card and driver the pink is the viewer’s error signal.
I did have a problem with the PhysX failing to install. I am researching that now. There are a number of known problems with this driver. See the nVidia 306.23 Release Notes (PDF file) for a list.
What I have found is:
- Having a second video card or processor other than nVidia installed will prevent the PhysX install.
- The 500 series has problems with SLI and duel screens.
- Win8 PreRelease version has to restart to complete the install.
- Some Internet Explorer 10 and YouTube problems.
- Notebooks and Hulu have problems.
- OpenGL issues on Vista and Win7. Doesn’t seem to be anything fatal for SL users.
- Problems with Adobe Flash 10 stuttering. – My experience is: do not play Facebook games and then try to run SL with the web browser open, game closed or not.
So far I have not seen a problem from the PhysX install fail nor any explanation or solution. So, for now things seem to be working.
The “pink textures” bug was primarily a result of Nvidia breaking a particular shader feature the viewer relied on to optimize texture rendering. Nvidia’s since fixed the bug in their drivers, which restored correct texture rendering.
I struggle with low frame rate with my first generation GeForce GTX 480. Often it falls below 10fps even though the card should support Ultra with shadows without any real effort. This update gained me over 3fps, a big deal for me.