No more unified nvidia drivers

[postmortemIA]

just noticed that options on nVIDIA drivers page are separated now to Gefore 8800, 8600 and 8500, 7 Sries, go 7800/7900 laptops, 6 series, Fx series, 4 series... you get the idea.

Way to go nvidia! That happens when you make more products that you can support.

 

[postmortemIA]

Also that might mean we won't see any new XP drivers for GeForce 6 and 7 series... ( hit: Version: 158.19 for series 8 only)

 

[Ulfhednar]

Nvidia driver support is utter tripe at the moment.

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: Ulfhednar
Nvidia driver support is utter tripe at the moment.

QFT...

 

[5150Joker]

Originally posted by: Ulfhednar
Nvidia driver support is utter tripe at the moment.

It's working fine for me so far but I'm using XP. Actually I'm faring better with nVidia drivers right now than I did with ATi's stuff.

 

[terentenet]

I'm running XP with 7900GTX SLI and 158.19 is working fine for me (with moddified inf).

 

[Mem]

I'm happy with my Vista x64 /Nvidia drivers at the moment ,but going back to AMD/ATI probably next month,time for a change and a upgrade .

 

[jim1976]

As long as they can manage to release proper drivers, I cannot understand why is this a bad thing? On the contrary I'd say driver "specialization" is a very good thing as it focuses on a certain architecture and its pros/cons, especially with the G80..

 

[Ackmed]

Originally posted by: jim1976
As long as they can manage to release proper drivers, I cannot understand why is this a bad thing? On the contrary I'd say driver "specialization" is a very good thing as it focuses on a certain architecture and its pros/cons, especially with the G80..

A lot of people dont have any idea what card they have. Or think they have one, but have another. Unified drivers solve this. It makes for a much easier download process. Especially with the dozen or so beta drivers NV puts out every month. With so many OS's, and cards, it may be very confusing to some people. But its their ignorance that is to blame, so I dont really care.

Doesnt matter to me either way. Just a few more clicks for a download, and Im smart enough to get the right ones. It is funny though that when NV had unified drivers, and ATi didnt, ATi caught a lot of flake for it. Doubt if that will happen now.

 

[Ulfhednar]

Originally posted by: 5150Joker
It's working fine for me so far but I'm using XP. Actually I'm faring better with nVidia drivers right now than I did with ATi's stuff.

I wish mine were working fine.

I was using the 158.19 Beta set from their website but I kept getting corruption in games and on desktop (missing icons, stuff sticking etc.) and 1:1 pixel mapping is broken, on top of that I get BSOD when I try to encode video and burn it to a DVD+RW.

I rolled back to 97.94 and suddenly everything is peachy (except 1:1 pixel mapping, still broken.)

 

[jim1976]

Originally posted by: Ackmed
A lot of people dont have any idea what card they have. Or think they have one, but have another. Unified drivers solve this. It makes for a much easier download process. Especially with the dozen or so beta drivers NV puts out every month. With so many OS's, and cards, it may be very confusing to some people. But its their ignorance that is to blame, so I dont really care.
Doesnt matter to me either way. Just a few more clicks for a download, and Im smart enough to get the right ones. It is funny though that when NV had unified drivers, and ATi didnt, ATi caught a lot of flake for it. Doubt if that will happen now.

Exactly m8 if you aren't smart enough to find out which card you have then you certainly don't have the need for newer drivers
J/K but you got the point I suspect.. I mean it's not like they are required to solve the riddle of the sphinx
And with G80 this should be mandatory due to the completely different architecture.. But even for the previous generations you probably get better attention to your specific issues..
As for the ATI comment I'm not aware of that. If someone says this is right for nVidia and wrong for ATI do you need me to telly you what this guy is?

 

[Gstanfor]

Well, we may as well try and make this thread useful for something. With that thought in mind, nHancer has been updated to be compatible with the 15x & 16x series Forceware drivers.

 

[MoobyTheGoldenCalf]

Originally posted by: postmortemIA
just noticed that options on nVIDIA drivers page are separated now to Gefore 8800, 8600 and 8500, 7 Sries, go 7800/7900 laptops, 6 series, Fx series, 4 series... you get the idea.

Way to go nvidia! That happens when you make more products that you can support.

This is completely wrong. nVidia is still using unified drivers. All those cards listed point to the same page/same drivers.

In fact I have an 8800GTX and a 6600LE in my machine right now using the UNIFIED Vista 32-bit 158.18 drivers. Everything running smooth as silk.

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: jim1976
As long as they can manage to release proper drivers, I cannot understand why is this a bad thing? On the contrary I'd say driver "specialization" is a very good thing as it focuses on a certain architecture and its pros/cons, especially with the G80..

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.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: MoobyTheGoldenCalf

Originally posted by: postmortemIA
just noticed that options on nVIDIA drivers page are separated now to Gefore 8800, 8600 and 8500, 7 Sries, go 7800/7900 laptops, 6 series, Fx series, 4 series... you get the idea.

Way to go nvidia! That happens when you make more products that you can support.

This is completely wrong. nVidia is still using unified drivers. All those cards listed point to the same page/same drivers.

In fact I have an 8800GTX and a 6600LE in my machine right now using the UNIFIED Vista 32-bit 158.18 drivers. Everything running smooth as silk.

Partially wrong. Vista drivers have been unified since launch but a lot of that is because all supported cards needed drivers and they facilitated the transition by cutting Vista support for cards lower than the 6-series.

Under XP, only the 8-series cards are listed for the 100-series and higher drivers. 7-series and lower point to 93 or 97 drivers. Makes sense kinda, unless you have a serious game-breaking bug for your 7-series card or lower you shouldn't really expect any spectacular improvements in the way of a driver.

As for all of the comments about NV drivers and G80 I just find it funny my experience has been exactly the opposite. Despite some early driver problems, the 100-series and higher have made my current rig the highest performing and most stable platform I've ever used. No BSODs, no memory leaks, no need to reboot or restart a game after a few hours of playtime.

I've played the same instance of Titan Quest for weeks (as well as a few other games) without crashing to desktop or having my rig mysteriously reboot overnight. I can't say that with any of my other Intel/AMD/ATI/Nvidia/Matrox/3dfx/Via whatever else hybrids in the past.

 

[xtknight]

That sucks. The situation is similar in Linux.

nvidia-glx-legacy is the only package that can be used with <=GF4.
nvidia-glx points to >GF4 cards.
nvidia-glx-new is the newer branch of >GF4 card drivers.

I wonder if they will have to further split -new. But it looks like the newer Windows driver designers haven't spread the poison over here quite yet. Windows NVIDIA drivers have been horrible lately for me, although the Linux ones are just as mediocre as they always have been in terms of features. At least they are still rock solid. I would say they are meeting my expectations in most aspects but certainly not going an inch beyond that.

 

[yacoub]

93.71s serving me fine on my 7900GT KO in WinXP for now. If I had some issues, I'd be more concerned, but since it's stable I can't say I mind.

 

[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.

 

[shabby]

They're still unified, it just seems that if you pick a gf6 or 7 you'll get the driver with the last update to that gpu.
It just seems like they're just cutting off support for the older cards.

 

[swtethan]

my drivers work great

 

[adairusmc]

Originally posted by: swtethan
my drivers work great

same here.

 

[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.

 

[Fraggable]

Didn't Vista require separate drivers for each model? I thought there was going to be a huge mess with DRM and 'secured channels' or something like that being required for video and sound drivers. I expected this to happen a while ago and it never did.

 

[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.

 

[hans007]

well this does make a lot of sense.


the 5,6 and 7 series cards have a lot of similarities. the 8 series has nothing in common with them so if they wanted a unified driver it would just be a giant download with 2 drivers in it basically.