Horrible 3D performance in Vista under BootCamp

Hi All,

I have the following system:
24-inch iMac
3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS with 512MB

I installed Boot Camp, and first I installed Vista 64Bit. I managed to get all of the drivers installed, and the OS worked fine. So I loaded up a few games. Half Life 2, Unreal Tournament 3, etc... Every game ran horrible! I maybe got 5fps on the lowest graphical settings. I know that Apple does not officially support 64bit Vista on the iMac and the video card driver I was using was a hack, but then Nvidia announced the availability of notebook video drivers directly from them. I their official driver, and I had the same results. I did a Google search on this, and tried everything I could find, updating the audio drivers, disabling the wireless connection, etc... Nothing helped.

So this I decided to install the 32bit version, and use all of the drivers that Apple provided. This proved easier as I didn't have to hunt down 64bit drivers. However the results were the same. Horrible performance in any Windows game. Again I tried the Nvidia drivers, and again they did not help. Sometimes I even get an error that the video driver has crashed and vista is recovering. This happened in both 64bit and 32bit.

I am installing Vista Ultimate and have tried this with SP1 and without.

I know that the GeForce 8800GS is not a killer card, and I am not expecting to run Crysis, but Half Life 2, and Unreal Tournament 3 should run just fine! I have a dedicated Windows box with a GeForce 8800GTS that runs those games without breaking a sweat! But the iMac stutters horribly on 800x600. When I try to move the mouse around when the game is running it skips, and is not smooth.

So I am thinking this either has to be a driver issue, and I've not found that one magical driver that will fix this, or maybe I have faulty hardware. OSX runs fine, granted I do not have any games for it so I cannot really stress the video card under OSX. I was thinking of getting Call of Duty 4 for OSX to see how it runs.

But does anyone have any ideas? I found online that some people have no problems, while others are experiencing what I am seeing.

Any help would be appreciated! If you need any more info about my setup, please let me know.

Thanks,
-Marek

You need to install the 2nd dvd of OS/X after you have installed the Vista. I am not sure if the Vista drivers are on there yet or not. I guess you can download from Apple or NVIDIA.

I downloaded the updated drivers from both Nvidia and Apple, and I am having the same issues.

After installing ultimate I ran the bootcamp setup from the second install disc and my vista runs fine, I didn't even grab any drivers from nvidia. HL2 and TF2 runs like a charm.

I would definitely suggest trying out CoD 4 for Mac. That at least would help narrow the scope, and if it works, you'll get a sweet game

I have CoD on order, when it comes in, I will try it in OSX and see how it runs. I am not sure the Apple Tech Support folk will be to willing to troubleshoot a Windows issue, but if I am having problems with an OSX game, well I might have them replace the computer for me. I did read somewhere that Nvidia had a batch of bad notebook chips, and I know iMac use notebook versions of the chip, which is what I may be seeing here. Let you guys know after I get CoD.