Ever since installing Windows Vista on my desktop PC, I’ve had issues running games. I have a semi-self-built PC running on a Foxconn motherboard that uses the SiS 661FX chipset and a GeForce 6600 GT.

The issue I had was graphical corruption under pretty much any game I ran. Random polygons would appear in scenes, making it very difficult to actually play games properly. An example of this corruption in Halo 2 is below.

Note that these problems did not occur under Windows XP on the same hardware.

After quite a lot of searching, I stumbled across this forum thread, where I found a solution which works for me.

Specifically in this posting, the author details a link to an older Windows 2000 driver for the SiS AGP slot itself.

Here’s my Spec’s:

Operating Systems: Dual Boot – Vista Ultimate & Win XP Pro
Pentium 4: 3.4GHZ
2GB of 400MHZ Memory
8 Hard Drives, 4 Internal & 4 External (I download a lot of Music & Appz)
Gigabyte Motherboard ( 8S661FXMP-RZ )
Pioneer DVD Writer 16X
19″ LCD Monitor
Operating Systems: Dual Boot – Vista Ultimate & Win XP Pro

Hi Kenmu,

I was having the same problems as you with artifacts (Graphic Corruption) on my brand new XFX Geforce 7800GS AGP with Vista Ultimate, My motherboard is a Gigabyte 8S661FXMP-RZ, So it’s using the S661FX Chipset,

So I know Gigabyte don’t have any Vista drivers, but I tried an older driver from there site

Here’s the link —> http://asia.giga-byte.com/FileList/Driver/motherboard_driver_chipset_sis_agp_661fx_651c.exe

Download and install it, I couldn’t believe that driver worked for me, Everything is back to it’s normal self, no Graphic Corruption and the speed is way up to normal levels when playing games

I installed this driver and I now no longer get polygon corruption as above, and I can play Halo 2 (and the other games) in Windows Vista just fine.

It did introduce a new problem with playing videos in games, but I’m not really bothered about that for the time being, as I can now actually play the game.

If you have a motherboard with this AGP chipset on it (even if, as the author of the post said, your mobo is not from Gigabyte), this solution is definitely worth a try.

If for some reason the link to the driver mentioned there fails to work, get in contact and I can send you a copy of the relevant driver file.

Further to my earlier post on discovering a bug with DfontSplitter for Windows which surfaces on some versions of Windows, I have now discovered a workaround for this issue on Vista.

If you are using DfontSplitter on Vista and when you convert a font, Windows then complains that it is not a valid font file, you can use this workaround to install the font into your Fonts folder. The font should then work normally.

I’ve tested this with a bunch of fonts, but it might not work absolutely everywhere. You’ll just have to try it and see if it helps.

The details of the workaround are listed here, on the dev wiki.

I’m still interested in testers for XP Service Pack 2. If you’d like to help out please get in contact via email or leave a comment below.