I've encountered some very strange bugs in the official Nvidia NT 4 drivers. They don't seem to work for me on Ivy Bridge or newer CPUs in MPS Multiprocessor mode, but they do work on older Intel CPUs.

I have a GeForce 6800 GS that works perfectly fine in my i7-2600k retro rocket with the Nvidia GeForce driver version 77.72 in NT 4 SP6. The drivers have no problems with 2D and OpenGL 3D operating on the Sandy Bridge processor in MPS Multiprocessor mode. I get generally excellent performance in this configuration.

I can't say the same when I try to run the same GPU and driver on any of my Ivy Bridge CPUs. In MPS Multiprocessor mode on Ivy Bridge, NT4 with Nvidia driver 77.72 will boot to the login prompt, but crash within seconds of loading the desktop (displaying a kmode exception error in nv4_disp.dll). If I run the same install in MPS Uniprocessor mode (by disabling all but one core in the BIOS) or Standard mode, NT4 will boot to the desktop and run OpenGL applications without issues. This same behavior occurs on GeForce driver version 71.84 and all of the 70-series Quadro drivers.

I thought this might be an incompatibility with the GeForce 6800 GS since it's slightly newer than the latest NT driver. So I bought a Quadro FX 4500, basically a GeForce 7800 GTX 512 which is supported by the latest driver, in the hope of resolving this issue. It did not. The Quadro FX 4500 crashes the same way. Out of curiosity, I next tried a PCI GeForce FX 5200 thinking this might be an incompatibility with PCI Express. Nope, same crash in MPS Multiprocessor mode.

I also tried the 7800 GTX in my 17-9700k (Coffee Lake) system using the 77.72 driver. It crashes the same way in MPS Multiprocessor mode (although it was cool to see NT report 8 System Processors while booting 😀

I think there's an MPS bug somewhere in the GPU driver specifically.

I know this post is getting long, but I also tried GeForce driver versions 61.76 and 66.93. They will boot to the desktop (2D) in MPS Multiprocessor mode on Ivy Bridge using both the FX 5200 and 6800 GS. Unfortunately, these driver's OpenGL .DLL crashes when using MPS Multiprocessor mode. But, OpenGL works properly in single processor mode. Obviously, I've found a different MPS bug in these drivers.

Has anyone else here encountered this issue? If so, do you know a work around? Is it possible to assign CPU affinity to any of these drivers to avoid the crash?