We ran into some trouble while playing the Lost Planet demo in Windows XP with our Geforce 8800 GTX or Geforce 8800 Ultra cards. Basically, the DirectX 9 version of the game under Windows XP crashes on these cards. We also tried the cards in Vista, as our first DirectX 10 demo and everything worked perfectly.

We used the same cards and this time the performance provided was excellent. At 1,920x1,080 with 4XFSAA, 16X Aniso, and other quality settings maxed out we got 33 FPS in the snow and 49 FPS in the caves.

It seems a bit low for good game play, but everything went smoothly and we had no issues whatsoever. We used the 158.42 beta Forceware driver as recommended by Nvidia.

As Windows XP doesn't have a new beta drivers, we used the 158.22 version with this OS. In the test demo included in the game we achieved 42 FPS in the snow and 56 FPS in the caves, on the same resolution of course. The result shows a clear advantage for XP, as the cards score 7 to 9 FPS higher than in Vista.

Even in XP, the test demo worked flawlessly, but when we tried to play the game demo under XP we were in for a nasty surprise, as the game would always crash. We tried it out in other resolutions and with different settings, but nothing seemed to help. Lost Planet won't play with an 8800 GTX or Ultra under DirectX 9. We can hear Nvidia telling us to use the DirectX 10 demo and Vista, as these cards deserve it. 

The main culprit for this issues is probably Nvidia's driver and we're hoping for a new beta which will solve the problems under XP. The Asus 8600 GT works without a hitch, both in DirectX 9 and 10, but the Geforce 8800 GTX and Ultra crashes no matter what. We'll go for the cheap one with this demo.

Updated

The Quadro driver 160.02 solves the problem and you can read more about it here.