Hi there again,
Seriously I hear what you're saying. IMO the NVidia drivers SHOULD support all instruction sets current at the time of their creation - and in the case of the 70 & 80 series drivers, that would include MMX, 3DNow, SSE & SSE2.
That's why I was confident in purchasing these EVGA GeForce 6200 PCI video cards to put into some old K6-3 PCs. Sure, they'll work . Why wouldn't they?
But from my experience, it appears that what SHOULD be the case, is NOT the case.
Every attempt to run any DirectX app using any 70 series driver results in an instant BSOD, with "KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED" & pinning NV4_DISP.DLL as the problem module. Yet all OpenGL apps run happily.
And using any 80 series driver, OpenGL no longer works (crash to desktop), DirectX 7 apps now work, but any DirectX 8 or 9 app gives instant BSOD, again with "KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED" & pinning NV4_DISP.DLL as the problem module.
I gather that the "KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED" means that the appropriate code to recover from an invalid instruction sequence is missing. Hence my suspicions about MMX & 3DNow support.
This is consistent with reports & advice on various Internet forums etc, eg:
http://www.amd-k6.com/os-support/
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/396996/geforce-drivers/bsod-stop-error-cpu-require-sse-need-help/post/2808685/
So it really does look like, starting at least from the 70 & 80 series drivers (and maybe even earlier) NVidia has neglected to properly implement MMX & 3DNow instructions in its drivers. That's been my experience with these EVGA cards, and apparently also with other people, using K6-2/3 era CPUs. If NVidia really did just choose to "forget about" MMX and 3DNow support in these old drivers (which appears to be the case) then upgrading to later drivers is unlikely to fix the problem.
I know this is kind of like beating a dead horse, given the vintage of these systems and drivers, but I was hoping someone might have some insight on the subject - or maybe even had access to 70 & 80 series drivers which specifically include MMX & 3DNow support sufficient to get DirectX and OpenGL working on Windows XP with a K6-2/3 CPU.
By the way, I really do appreciate your comments. It's an issue from prehistory, and not your problem, so IMO any advice or suggestion is a gift.
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