[{DvT}JonahHex]

I spent most of yesterday afternoon fighting with drivers: BSODs, freeze-ups, reboots. Both sound-card and video drivers in both XP Home x32 and Vista Home Premium x64.

Finally uninstalled my SB X-Fi card (from Windoze, not physically from the box) and disabled it, then enabled the mobo onboard sound and tried it. I'm playing now altho I still get freeze-ups.

In Vista I keep getting the "nvlddmkm stopped responding" error. It recovers, then almost immediately errors out again - rebooting fixes it...until the next time. I'm probably getting the same problem in XP, it just doesn't report the error as such. The nVidia forum are rife with threads regarding this error in various games and Demos - Crysis and Bioshock to mention the two (demos) that I have. I have not had this problem prior to UT3.

Regardless, the game is awesome! I'll get the driver probs fixed sooner or later (or nVidia will). In meantime, running everything cranked up all the way, I haven't seen framerates less than 100 (after unlocking them) and when they said that the Demo used 1/2 textures, I believe it. The maps aren't bright and pretty, as many 2K4 maps were...they are more remenicient of U1 maps ... with 10x the detail. If you'll recall, the graphics in Unreal were unreal. I'm not sure that they have recaptured that ... I'm not sure it is possible to do ... but whereas I was somewhat concerned by the graphics in the UT3 Demo, the Retail is everything I was hoping for.