This may not apply to many folks, but here goes:

If you’re running Windows 7, if you have an nVidia card but it isn’t an “uber” card, and you play City of Heroes, and you decide to upgrade to the 266-series drivers… make sure you remove the PhysX and “nVidia 3D” components via Programs & Features or risk abysmal performance.

I’ve had to run without FSAA, without Anisotropic, and with basically none of the Ultra Mode fancy stuff turned on since I converted to Windows 7 on my HP xw4400 workstation with the 9800 GT. Which struck me as a bit odd since I ran with most of the “UM” goodies enabled (at lower settings, mind you) under XP on the same hardware. (Yes, it was a fresh install. This isn’t my first rodeo, Mr. Stark.)

Tonight a CoH patch came down, and after that applied… I got less than one frame per second. Much less. I had to find the command line arguments so I could force a lower screen resolution just to get the Options display to appear. After an hour of frustrated tinkering & researching, I was getting ready to roll back to a much older driver release. While in Programs & Features getting ready to yank them out, I noticed the other two nVidia entries in the list. On a whim I pulled just those out, and rebooted.

And… City of Heroes ran like a dream, albeit with the reduced settings I’d been forced to adopt. So I turned on FSAA to 2x, which had previously brought the game to its knees.

Still smooth. And after I turned Anisotropic Filtering back on. And the Ultra Mode shadows. And bloom. And depth of field. (Yes, all of those were off to get any kind of performance, previously.)

I don’t know what the hell “nVidia 3D” is, but I suspect it doesn’t play nicely with City of Heroes, and I don’t have anything else that needs it. Good riddance. As for PhysX… if that was the culprit, I’ll live without it, thank you very much.