nView/Compatibility

nView 3.0's new desktop wizard

Mouse Menu within nView

nView's Effects Menu

Screen Adjustment Menu

nView's Zoom Menu

nView 3.0

One of the key changes to nView 3.0 is the new gridlines feature. With it, you can more effectively control the real estate on your monitor’s screen by dividing your monitor up into separate regions. Gridlines are used to accomplish this.

Simply enable display gridlines in the user interface menu of nView, then define the grids with your mouse, your monitor can be split up into as many as four regions if you own a GeForce card, Quadro cards supports up to nine regions.

User Interface Menu, gridlines

The size of the grids is totally up to the end user, as they’re defined entirely with the mouse, so you could make two thinner grids at the top of your monitor, and two larger ones at the bottom (or vice versa) or if you’d rather just split your monitor in half you can do that too.

Setting up the gridlines, main menu

Gridlines are made by dragging the mouse

Here you can see the grids defined

NVIDIA documentation refers to them as sub-monitors, which effectively describes what the grid lines do. You can use them to quickly reposition applications, which is helpful when multitasking; this is accomplished by sending windows to a grid. Another added benefit is that you can quickly resize windows, as the area of the grids is defined when you initially setup the gridlines.

NVIDIA’s nView 3.0 documentation also describes a new pop-up blocker for Internet Explorer users (perfect for those of you like me who like to hit up ESPN.com on a daily basis), but unfortunately we couldn’t find it.

Bug report

We’ve had a few weeks to play with the new 52.16 drivers, and in our experience, they’re pretty reliable across a broad range of software applications and hardware. That doesn’t mean that they’re perfect though. One FS reader, Bjorn Larsen sent in a few screenshots with Splinter Cell that shows lighting issues in the game (his screenshots were taken with an MSI GeForce FX 5900-TD128 card):

Splinter Cell with 45.23

And now 52.16

45.23

Note the absence of light in 52.16

Shadows with 45.23

Where'd the shadows go?

We haven’t run into this with any of our custom Splinter Cell demos, so our test results are unaffected, but it was still something we wanted to report on. We’ve also seen reports of problems with NVIDIA’s new nView software where DualView and/or Windows desktop settings aren’t saved after the system is rebooted.

One issue that was somewhat alarming to us however was our inability to get our reference GeForce FX 5200 Ultra card to work properly with ForceWare 52.16. For whatever reason, the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra’s fan does not operate when 52.16 is installed on our testbed system. As a result, after a few minutes of gaming, the card would begin to overheat, frame rates would quickly taper off or the system would behave erratically, and eventually the testbed would either crash or reboot itself. A quick re-install of Detonator 45.23 would resolve this issue, so we’re convinced that the driver is the culprit.

If you recall our GeForce FX 5800 Ultra preview, we ran into similar issues with beta Detonator drivers, where the card would occasionally underclock itself after overheating (particularly in certain software applications) although in that case the FX Flow cooling system was always operating properly and the system would never crash.

This issue is particularly troubling to us because you could potentially damage your graphics card. In NVIDIA’s defense, it’s possible that this may be an isolated case that just affects our reference card, as we haven’t seen this reported anywhere else anecdotally or in online forums. We informed NVIDIA of this issue late last week but haven’t received an official response.