Yesterday the chaps at
The Tech
Report reported on an issue affecting a good chunk of GeForce 8800 users,
where 3D graphics performance would fall into the toilet at random and wouldn't
come back until you restarted the game or tabbed out and back in. NVIDIA got
back to them and said it was a driver issue and that the driver team were
working on a fix. Oh well.
Now Beyond3D reports that
the slowdown bug is
probably caused by texture eviction from device memory. Textures aren't
being evicted when they should be, causing a loss of available device memory for
other resources. So it stands to reason that if you restart the app or tab out
and back in, both of which reset the device which causes a VRAM flush, you'll be
good to go again. It's somewhat application dependent and depends on how the app
does surface management, but a general fix should be possible for all but the
most misbehaved programs. Let's hope they fix it as soon as possible.