NVidia 7 Series video and audio stuttering, choppy, poor quality

Possible Explanation

I installed and ran up SOAS and was upset to find my video AND audio to become stupidly choppy whenever the game was drawing objects as simple as the planets in the main menu. It turns out that the stuttering/choppy sound is just the side effect of a much more serious problem.

My game ran very slowly and every now and then it would completely freeze for a few seconds. I tried new drivers, new memory, more memory, and always the same thing. It ran like crap. My CPU sat around 40% and the ram stayed under 85%. Well I found a possible reason here:

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=30162

I'm running a Toshiba Qosmio G35-AV600 laptop with an Nvidia Go 7300, 1gb of ram, and 1.8G dual core intel processor. Just above some of the minimum specs, so it shouldn't be running like it's on a Pentium II.

It looks like there's a problem with this particular series of video cards -- notebook and desktop alike -- and Vista. This problem being there are no drivers for them. The only solution at this time is to uninstall Vista and go back to XP. I don't have my XP software or any media to back my stuff up on so I can't do this until I get back home at the end of the month, but from what I've read there should be a night-and-day improvement.

Hope that helps both people having problems and the devs here. It doesn't look like anything can be done on the dev end, but it's good to know for future reference.
1,834 views 3 replies
Reply #1 Top
It turns out that the stuttering/choppy sound is just the side effect of a much more serious problem. My game ran very slowly and every now and then it would completely freeze for a few seconds.


I, also, have experienced audio stuttering with total game-freeze on 5 occasions.

In my case, I have WinXP and a series 6 videocard (GF 6800).

Such a phenomenon never occurs in my other games.

I'm not suggesting that my problem is identical to yours. I am simply stating that you are not alone in Space.

Reply #2 Top
You may want to check out http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ for newer Nvidia drivers for your laptop. It may not solve the problem, but the only thing keeping you from installing the latest drivers is an inf file setting.
Reply #3 Top
As per the thread I linked to, updated drivers with an edited inf file don't solve this problem. It's something to do with the way vista interacts with these particular cards. The only apparent way to fix the problem is to go back to XP until new drivers are released for these cards -- which it doesn't look like will happen unfortunately.