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I have GeForce 9500M GS on my laptop and I've been having performance problems with things like CUDA, PhysX, VLC player and Flash acceleration since driver version 263.06.

For example 1920x1080 videos on Youtube look like a slideshow with newer drivers and are much slower when hardware acceleration is enabled compared to just CPU. On drivers 263.06 and older, everything works fine, so the speed of the card itself isn't the problem. The card performance in games seems to be fine.

I'm running windows 7 64bit with SP1.

So how do I solve this problem?

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What's the latest driver you've tried? 270.61 (WHQL) is available... – techie007 Apr 30 '11 at 22:49
@techie007 All official up to that one. – AndrejaKo May 1 '11 at 9:48
Related thread on nVidia forums:forums.nvidia.com/… – AndrejaKo May 4 '11 at 17:54
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3 Answers

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Your video driver is outdated. The new one is VERDE RELEASE 270.61 FOR NOTEBOOKS which says :

Adds support for applications using CUDA 4.0 features such as Unified Virtual Addressing (UVA) and GPUDirect™ v2.0.

Meaning that some CUDA features were not available or badly implemented with the previous driver.

If Nvidia had broken CUDA support for your model even with the latest drivers, the best advice is to get help from Nvidia Support and stay with the older version until it is fixed (or until one gets a new computer).

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Just to make things clear, he problem is a regression in drivers. As I said, it first appeared in both unofficial and official drivers after version 263.06. I saw one thread about this kind of problem a while back on their support forums, but no help was offered. I'll check if I can find it again. – AndrejaKo May 4 '11 at 11:33
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up vote 1 down vote

I had a similar problem with a 9600GT. Cycling the PhysX processor to CPU and back to Auto fixed it.

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Unfortunately, that didn't help me. – AndrejaKo May 4 '11 at 11:39
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up vote 1 down vote

Why can't you just use the older driver that works properly?

I am a strong believer that there is no reason to update a driver unless it introduces a specific feature or bugfix that you need - especially in the case of video drivers, nVidia and ATI both love to introduce new "features" in their drivers that often break certain configurations. This is almost certainly an introduced bug.

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I know what it is and so on and so on and yes, I'm fully aware than I can use old drivers and so on and so on. However I do some CUDA programing and it could happen really soon that I'm going to need the features made available in new drivers. – AndrejaKo May 4 '11 at 17:36
@AndreajaKo - Fair enough. The issue still stands though - if there's a bug in the graphics driver there's not much you can do about it. For persons who aren't power users like yourself this is also the best advice in general - don't touch your drivers! – Shinrai May 4 '11 at 17:48
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