sys specs: opteron 64 170 (dual core, 2GHz), 2GiB RAM, GF 7600GT, WinXP Home SP2
nvidia forceware 169.21, DirectX March 08

problems with bioshock v1: regular stuttering (gaming for 30 secs, wait one sec, game 30 secs, wait one sec, etc), no sound interruption though

patched-v1.1 problems: menu flickers (black), game runs well for a couple of hours, then it crashes and gives me a nv4_disp dll error. dxdiag shows no problems.

other unreal3-based games run well (->stranglehold, ut3).

any help appreciated.

wow, now i installed driver 175.16, and now my pc doesn't recognise the dvd drive anymore...?!

man, this piece of software hates me.

i unistalled the dvd drives and the according IDE channel, fired up windows in secure mode, installed the missing drivers, rebootet.
now the bioshock dvd was recognized. new behaviour: crash at medical pavillon.

uninstalled the game, reinstalled, back to version 1.0. freezes at the startup movie. now i'm getting patch 1.1 international.

-.-

fine, the international 1.1 patch threw a bunch of errors at me. at least i got past trhe opening movie. than it doesn't load the main menu. excellent.

installed german/english patch 1.1 again. now i get even sound stuttering and the game freezes in the airplane at the very beginning.

you got something really worng but hard to recognize what it is.

i played the dx10 ver.1.0.0.0 with both 169 and 175 drivers without any problems.

and about the dvd drive? wtf is related between a dvd drive and a display driver?

According to the system diffrences between my system and your system, i can only blame the AMD procressor.

I played it fine on an AMD processor. I have less RAM (1 Gig) than you (Broozar) and an older CPU but it runs fine in high quality settings.

So I guess it is some timing problem of your hardware or a serious software problem in Windows.

well, at least it seems to be related to the amd processor.

the game now starts only after i've activated the dual core optimizer (tsc synchronizing tool). certain passages of the game only work in windowed game mode, so if something looks suspicious, i have to save and change to windowed mode. the flickering of the main menu also goes away in windowed mode.

I have a somewhat similar system and bioshock runs totally fine here (still using v.1.0).
sys specs: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (dual core, 2.21GHz), 2GiB RAM, GF 7800GT, WinXP Prof SP2.

I never heard of tsc synchronizing tool. I'm using the official amd_dc_opt.exe instead to fix dual core problems. Maybe that's the reason why it's not working for you correctly?

[edit] just realized what you mean with "tsc sync tool". So i guess you already have the official fix installed.

yes. the problem with the fix is, i don't have an X2, i have an opteron dual core. they are based on the same core, but have different cache sizes etc. so there is no "official" tool for the opteron. and the tsc tool (yeah, we mean the same) always makes some cuts in the frame rate...

i wonder why all other u3-engine games (ut3 demo, stranglehold) run fine without the tsc tool at _remarkably_ higher framerates.

As far as i know bioshock was the 2nd game to be released using the new u3-engine (the first one was a game for children where you play a robot). So maybe bioshock is using an older version of the engine that has more bugs. Just a guess though and doesn't really fix your problem.