Regarding NVIDIA driver, certain games, and Steam Overlay

[Cyanic 5]

If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, and you try to launch certain games from Steam, you may notice that the Steam Overlay doesn't work. It's an odd combination, but there's a bug in the NVIDIA DirectX hooking code regarding unloading DirectX libraries. Usually games either link to DirectX libraries at compile time or at runtime. However, some games do both, most likely inadvertently. What happens is when attempting to unload the library after use in one part of the game code, the NVIDIA driver isn't smart enough to check that the library was linked at compile time and can't be unloaded, and proceeds to unhook itself. Unfortunately, the driver also doesn't check what it's actually unhooking, and ends up unhooking Steam Overlay. That's why you can't use the overlay in certain games on an NVIDIA card. I've already filed a bug report, and NVIDIA is looking into it. No idea how long it'll take for them to fix it, though.

 

Known Affected Games

• Alpha Prime
• All Sam & Max titles from Telltale Games

[Mirh 103]

Gosh.

Just yesterday I struggled to make MSI afterburner overlay (aka RivaTuner) working with GTA: San andreas, on an old GeForce 7100/nForce 630i system (yeah, integrated IGP).

I really couldn't figure out why game hanged as soon as 3D rendering was supposed to start.

 

Then I checked "custom Direct3D support" box (that one that you would usually use with injection tools such as ENB series or SMAA injector), and it worked -ok, I had to select Vector 2D rendering mode too-

Could this be related?

 

EDIT: speaking of nForce, I should really check this.

Edited July 13, 2016 by Mirh
nforce consideration