No more unified nvidia drivers

[postmortemIA]

Originally posted by: DefRef

Originally posted by: Ackmed
A lot of people dont have any idea what card they have. Or think they have one, but have another.

If you're that clueless as to what kind of card you have, you're unlikely to even know that drivers need to be updated.

I had an old boss who was complaining about how his top-of-the-line gaming PC he'd bought was running poorly with some game. I asked if he'd tried updating his drivers and he had no idea what I was talking about or how it would be done.

This is another reason why console gaming will always be bigger - note that I said bigger, not better - than PC gaming; you pop the disc in and it runs properly.

It is not just about updating the drivers. It is about getting the drivers for the first time. Imagine n00b that installs XP on his new 22" LCD and stares at 800x600 resoultion with "WTF I am gonna do?"

 

[Matt2]

Originally posted by: postmortemIA

Originally posted by: DefRef

Originally posted by: Ackmed
A lot of people dont have any idea what card they have. Or think they have one, but have another.

If you're that clueless as to what kind of card you have, you're unlikely to even know that drivers need to be updated.

I had an old boss who was complaining about how his top-of-the-line gaming PC he'd bought was running poorly with some game. I asked if he'd tried updating his drivers and he had no idea what I was talking about or how it would be done.

This is another reason why console gaming will always be bigger - note that I said bigger, not better - than PC gaming; you pop the disc in and it runs properly.

It is not just about updating the drivers. It is about getting the drivers for the first time. Imagine n00b that installs XP on his new 22" LCD and stares at 800x600 resoultion with "WTF I am gonna do?"

Haha, I have a friend who's parents bought a $3500 Dell XPS system and stare at 800x600 on their 22" screen. Not to mention for $3500 they got an INtel GMA X3000 onbard video... haha.

I told them to let me build it, but they didnt trust me. I hope they go blind from staring at 800x600 on a 22" screen.

 

[natto fire]

I can see the need to do this between the DX10/DX9 hardware, but breaking down every line seems kind silly. Especially considering how much they used to pimp the fact they had unified drivers.

My guess is multiple teams of hack amateurs figured it would be easier to go on their own separate ways, instead of working together to make unified code. Probably not the actual reason, and really don't care, as the drivers I have for my 7900GS have been working fine. (XG)

 

[Matt2]

I think this is the best route for Nvidia at the moment.

I think we'll see much better G80 drivers now.

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: jim1976

Originally posted by: ElFenix

the unified drivers allowed nvidia to meet it's ship dates. yes, specialization can give a theoretically faster driver. however, because nvidia is constrained as to the number of man hours that it can spend optimizing a driver, that won't be the case in reality. with the unified, they always had a working driver for a part and optimizations/fixes for one part often helped with others.

Man hrs is an issue I agree. D3D10 is a major headache for them also. Difficult times to be a driver developer..
But you have to look at the general picture. I don't agree with the second part of your claim. A G80 working driver for example does not always fix other series issues. I'd say the contrary is the truth, due to the completely different architecture, it might cause issues. Sometimes trying to fix a problem for a specific series may cause issues to another, that's why we are seeing game issues that were not existent in a prior driver.

G80 is such a different beast that it'll demand it's own driver tree, but all the products based on it will probably continue to be a unified driver.

 

[TanisHalfElven]

Originally posted by: michal1980
they should at least do a noob unified downloader.

that checks you system, and downloads the correct driver... so user doesn't have to pick.


but i'll tell you this. in the end, people that update drivers, general know what they need.

those that dont, general do not even know about drivers.

not really. my parent and sister both re-install windows quite frequently. they would want to install drivers but may not know what they have in there.

 

[cvrefugee]

I downloaded and installed the 158.18 drivers for my 6800GT - WORST DRIVERS EVER! They finished installing with a black screen (no input detected says my monitor). I had to boot into safe mode to uninstall them. These are the Vista 32-bit drivers, if anyone cares to know. Guess I'm back to the default MS drivers :/

 

[Aikouka]

CV, that sounds like the black screen bug. You have to just restart the machine and it would've been fine. It happened to me once with my 8800GTX.

To my knowledge though... Vista drivers are unified .

 

[cvrefugee]

Originally posted by: Aikouka
CV, that sounds like the black screen bug. You have to just restart the machine and it would've been fine. It happened to me once with my 8800GTX.

To my knowledge though... Vista drivers are unified .

I tried that too, no dice.