Hi all

I've never seen such a thing with Nvidia, so here goes my question:

I played around with BoBII yesterday, which BTW requires the same 3DOverrider tool as STALKER:CS to set Vsynch. I'm starting to dislike ATI drivers on W7 since they can't even do Vsync, but I guess that's a separate topic.

Ultimatly it all seemed to work pretty well, I only got one CTD after trying some extreme settings and then kept playing all evening.

Yet when I closed BoBII at the end, I noticed my tray bar icon for the CCC was gone, and it wasn't "hidden" either.

Is it possible that CCC crashes without taking down the GFX driver? Anyone seen that?

It came back after a reboot.

This post and the FSX thread, have me intrigued to see what it would take to "break" my ATI setup with the games I play. Its an experiment I might try someday. I'd do it now but, right now I'm obsessing over Dragon Age -- and probably have more than 60 hours of game play ahead of me.

Well, it was a bit of heavy load:

1) GPU scaling "Centered Timings" which is a bit funky, since often you can see your desktop blinking trough while the game switches menus

2) BoBII generally is switching a lot of stuff around, even changing rendering methods (looks to me...) often.

3) The D3DOverrider running fixing Vsync.


So there was a lot of shuffling of screens, switching resolutions, loading and unloading 3d parts.

Come to think of it, I had NVidia drivers fail (critical error) on games with too large texture loads (Stalker, Arma1) which at the time I suspected to be caused by my weak PSU. To ATIs credit when the CCC goes south, the driver stays active, whereas in NVidias case you get a 8bit color desktop and it demands to reboot.

If the tray icon is gone, check task manager to see if CCC is still running.

About once a month back with WinXP, I'd get a message upon booting to my desktop that CCC had suffered an error and needed to close. Hasn't happened in Win7.

To be fair, I have known plenty of guys in the past who were suffering with nVidia drivers that were crashing or "not responding" during our gaming sessions. Sometimes repeatedly for no reason. Enough to cause them just turn the game off in frustration.

Ah okay, so it's not unheard off. I think CCC is running as a "Service", may be able to reload it next time.

Yeah, Nvidia does weird stuff as well, I think what most surprised me was that simple the CCC had gone with no other notable effects.

It's not really a complaint here, more like I wanted to be sure that the icon vanishing could really mean a crash and nothing else.

I seem to recall in the days when ATI moved to the .net architecture and the resulting CCC would take a minute or two to loadup at the Windows start that you could tweak it so that CCC never loaded thus speeding startup time. From that I believe the CCC program and the driver are seperate entities. I used to shutdown CCC after it had loaded in those days without any ill-effect.

Yes, CCC and the driver are separate. One can download the driver separately and install without CCC. I had my wife's computer and the grand kids computers running that way -- keeps then out of trouble "clicking" on stuff in CCC they don't understand.

Not running CCC has no impact on what you can do with the inside-game settings or FPS -- CCC is not required for games. There have been times I did not install CCC -- just as an experiment. As you say, the computer was ready faster on startup. There are rare times I click the icon and "exit" CCC -- no effect.

I use CCC mainly for the fan setting and some fun overclocking. Otherwise I'm happy with the defaults.