Hi all, recently I've bump into quite a puzzling problem - on this PC I had some really old graphics card - Nvidia Ge Force 7300GT and Windows XP. One day the GFX card started to give me serious problems and I decided to replace it with GT 610 (since this is not my primary gaming PC and I'm trying to build of it a minimum playable system). I re-installed the drivers and everything seemed ok, until I got to the gaming part.
Some of my games runs fine, like before this forced upgrade, but some runs terrible and I'm not able to find the reason for that. DirectX and Direct 3D seems fine according to dxdiag, but OpenGL Extension viewer doesn't recognise my video card and list my renderer as "GDI generic" that supports DirectX 9.0c + Shader model vs 3.0 and ps 3.0.

The games that worked totally fine with 7300GT and are absolutely not playable with GT 610 are:
3030 DeathWar (DRM Free, portable, Desura build)
(below are all steam)
Obulis
Thomas Was Alone (even after re-install)
Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space
(below are all GOG)
Defcon

Games that worked fine before AND now:
Retro City Rampage DX
Sunless Sea
(below are all steam)
Gratuitous Space Battles
Clones
Solar 2
Solar Flux
Floating Point
Arma: Cold War Assault
(below are all GOG)
VVVVVV
Earth 2160
Torchlight
To The Moon
(below are all origin)
Peggle Deluxe
Bejeweled 3

You see my bafflement - games with higher graphics details are working just fine, but the lower graphics intensive games are running with 1-5 fps now :(((
Is this a driver issue (I'm using the ones provided with the CD for the new GPU), or is it OpenGL related problem or probably a specific engine problem (Unity, flash,...).
I don't want to upgrade the XP yet, because on this machine I have specialized software which licensed version works only on XP (new version that works on 7 means new license = more money :(().

Have you tried downloading the latest driver from the nVidia web site? (that's a direct link to the driver download page for GT 610 on Windows XP, in English)

Yes, just installed the latest driver and it's all the same :(

Give Display Driver Uninstaller a try and see if it helps.

Unfortunately it didn't help :( It found my old driver and the new one I uninstalled them and restarted, ran again DDU didn't found anything so I installed the newest driver for my system, restarted and ran DDU again and it reported only the newest driver, but the problem persists :(
It's all the same, for example Din's Curse [GOG] runs like sh*t, Galactic Arms Race [steam] runs flawless and Destination Sol [open source, f2p] doesn't start at all - "OpenGL is not supported by the video driver" :(

Strange..
Could you try these:

355.97
368.22
340.52

Don't forget to use ddu everytime you reinstall drivers, in safe mode ; p

I'm with that one, now, and btw I do "clean install" so the config and other pointers to old driver files should not interfere, will try the older ones these days and report back.

Well everything seems fine now. DDU didn't catch all of the old driver residues, so I have to manually uninstall everything NVIDIA in the control panel (because on this PC I have nforce430 motherboard chip, so I had to remove PCI management bla bla, Ethernet driver and I think one more) + "ASUS Enhanced Display Driver" (probably part of my older VGA driver since the old VGA was ASUS, but the mobo is ASUS too so it might be a part of some utilities), and after reinstall of the chipset drivers and VGA everything is fine now - all games works as they should be.

Btw from your experience, for a low-end GPU what drivers do you prefer - the newest or the oldest - the ones in the CD accompanying the VGA?