NVIDIA and Vista Driver News

[Nelsieus]

Just saw this posted at HardOCP

http://www.hardocp.com/news.html?news=MjM3NjUsLCxobmV3cywsLDE=

No doubt NVIDIA?s lack of Vista drivers for their hardware has been a heated topic since the launch of the 8800 series. Well we have a lot of good news tonight direct from the mouths at NVIDIA. NVIDIA has released their ?NVIDIA Windows Vista Driver version 100.54? tonight to developers, testers, and reviewers under an information embargo. So obviously it will likely be found online any minute for your download. Some things to note though.

This driver is intended for testing on GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS series GPUs. This driver is intended for DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 application testing in single GPU only. It is not recommended for NVIDIA SLI testing. 3D performance of this driver is improved over Release 95 Vista drivers, and is on par with Windows XP for the top applications, with the exception of OpenGL applications. This driver can also be used with GeForce 7 and GeForce 6 series GPUs, though performance can be slower on some applications because we still have work to do on our drivers.

Our goal is to get Vista performance equivalent to XP performance wherever possible, and we will do this through continuous driver updates.

NVIDIA's plan is to make a driver available for end users on NVIDIA.com on January 30, 2007. This driver is a beta driver and the first SLI driver, intended to support GeForce 8, 7, and 6 series GPUs, and will add support for GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS DirectX 9 SLI on the top applications. NVIDIA will continue to work on optimizing our Windows Vista drivers to ensure maximum performance on 3D applications.

In additon, NVIDIA is working very closely with Microsoft to finalize the WHQL certified DirectX 10 driver for the GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS GPU. Both companies have been in close communication to ensure that the logo kit gets finalized to enable the certification of the driver as soon as possible to enable getting it into the hands of customers.

So good news for Vista / G80 owners, but not so great news for SLI users.

Nelsieus

 

[Paratus]

Flamewar in 3....2....1......

 

[Keysplayr]

@ Paratus: To some, this is very good news. To others, it can never be good enough. The problem is, these folks can never ever agree to disagree. That is the only problem. Everyone is totally and completely right, always. No exceptions. Til the last breathe. I'm just very glad I'm not one of those anymore. Used to be, but now I just soak it all in at my own pace. Yes, I can learn from my mistakes. :thumbsup:

 

[Nelsieus]

Flamewar in 3....2....1......

Let's hope not...

Nelsieus

 

[Paratus]

Originally posted by: keysplayr2003
@ Paratus: To some, this is very good news. To others, it can never be good enough. The problem is, these folks can never ever agree to disagree. That is the only problem. Everyone is totally and completely right, always. No exceptions. Til the last breathe. I'm just very glad I'm not one of those anymore. Used to be, but now I just soak it all in at my own pace. Yes, I can learn from my mistakes. :thumbsup:

:thumbsup:

Looks like I was wrong

I agree this is good news. Looks like we'll be seeing some Vista benches soon.

Personally I'll be pleasantly suprised if we see better performance on Vista over XP on the first driver releases for both companies.

posted via Palm Life Drive

 

[Paratus]

dp

 

[Narse]

ok someone has got to have emm.... cough emm up

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: Narse
ok someone has got to have emm.... cough emm up

First place I would look would be Guru3d, but it looks like they still just have the 100.30 series as of right now. Maybe by tomorrow they'll have the new kid on the block.

 

[jim1976]

Good news.. Things are starting to get in order

SLI support still seems a major problem and this sucks for G80 SLI users... But IMHO one has to be sympathetic and understand the major differences of both OS/APIs and the work that has to be done/tested..

 

[Gstanfor]

I just find it highly amusing that good old M$ advertises Vista/DX10 as being more efficient and therefore faster than XP, yet the graphics vendors are having to work overtime just to get equivelant performance happening.

No great surprise though - blowing smoke up people's @rse is about the only thing m$ truly excels at...

 

[terentenet]

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
I just find it highly amusing that good old M$ advertises Vista/DX10 as being more efficient and therefore faster than XP, yet the graphics vendors are having to work overtime just to get equivelant performance happening.

No great surprise though - blowing smoke up people's @rse is about the only thing m$ truly excels at...

Gstanfor,

That's not fair. Vista isnt even trully released yet, we can't ask for better performance right now. Wait a couple of months until drivers get to mature a little. I think DX10 and Vista are better than XP. They do need to get SLI to work though.
That's what we used to say when XP came out and XP outperformed 98. Many friends of mine still keep dual boot of 98 and XP. Shame on them.

Originally posted by: Nelsieus
This driver is intended for DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 application testing in single GPU only. It is not recommended for NVIDIA SLI testing.

This driver is intended for Single GPUs, not recommended for SLI. Normally that would mean SLI is working but performance is not as expected. Can you select SLI for these drivers? Even with lower performance?

Thanks

 

[Gstanfor]

IIRC, SLI not working properly is yet another M$ problem that nvidia (and presumably AMD/ATi with crossfire) are forced to work around.

 

[Aberforth]

DirectX 10 is faster than 9. V10 has shorter Api call processing time which decreases load on CPU- in most cases the DX10 processing takes place directly in GPU which increases CPU efficiency and overall performance of Windows Vista (thats why Vista is faster) - some people believe that Windows Aero does not affect the system performance because of this. Windows XP doesn't have enough technology to run Dx10.

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
I just find it highly amusing that good old M$ advertises Vista/DX10 as being more efficient and therefore faster than XP, yet the graphics vendors are having to work overtime just to get equivelant performance happening.

No great surprise though - blowing smoke up people's @rse is about the only thing m$ truly excels at...

Ugh, quit parading the unnecessary hatred around. The reason it's taking so long for competent drivers is that the entire driver model is different from the Win9x or WinNT setup. If I remember correctly, the whole concept of a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) is gone, which is what the previous drivers were all based off of. So, the more drastic a change is, the more effort is required to facilitate the changes for those affected.

Although, I thought that this was the best line of the whole article:

So obviously it will likely be found online any minute for your download.

I'll be waiting for them as my copy of Vista should arrive today along with my new raptor drive to install it on .

 

[Cookie Monster]

Originally posted by: jim1976
Good news.. Things are starting to get in order

SLI support still seems a major problem and this sucks for G80 SLI users... But IMHO one has to be sympathetic and understand the major differences of both OS/APIs and the work that has to be done/tested..

SLi support could be delayed becasue of this. Sprry for being OT but i just thought this would be interesting.

Link

We heard faintly about NVIDIA SLI 2.0 technology and it is going to launch during CeBIT in March. Little information is available at this moment but we heard that it will be able to support mixed cards. We are unclear if it is across different series or different models of the same series.. Also there are some rumors out now that GeForce 8x00 series will be able to support multi-GPUs SLI by linking up 4, 6 to 8 cards or more. This multi-GPUs SLI capability could form part of the SLI 2.0 technology we are hearing.

Its about time SLi gets some extreme make over. (its been here for more than 3 years now). So the delay of SLi on G80 could be because of this.

 

[Nelsieus]

Link

We heard faintly about NVIDIA SLI 2.0 technology and it is going to launch during CeBIT in March. Little information is available at this moment but we heard that it will be able to support mixed cards. We are unclear if it is across different series or different models of the same series.. Also there are some rumors out now that GeForce 8x00 series will be able to support multi-GPUs SLI by linking up 4, 6 to 8 cards or more. This multi-GPUs SLI capability could form part of the SLI 2.0 technology we are hearing.

:Q

This is the first time I've heard about this! Excellent find! I've been waiting for this ever since, well, SLI and CF came to the table.

Nelsieus

 

[jim1976]

Originally posted by: Cookie Monster

Originally posted by: jim1976
Good news.. Things are starting to get in order

SLI support still seems a major problem and this sucks for G80 SLI users... But IMHO one has to be sympathetic and understand the major differences of both OS/APIs and the work that has to be done/tested..

SLi support could be delayed becasue of this. Sprry for being OT but i just thought this would be interesting.

Link

We heard faintly about NVIDIA SLI 2.0 technology and it is going to launch during CeBIT in March. Little information is available at this moment but we heard that it will be able to support mixed cards. We are unclear if it is across different series or different models of the same series.. Also there are some rumors out now that GeForce 8x00 series will be able to support multi-GPUs SLI by linking up 4, 6 to 8 cards or more. This multi-GPUs SLI capability could form part of the SLI 2.0 technology we are hearing.

Its about time SLi gets some extreme make over. (its been here for more than 3 years now). So the delay of SLi on G80 could be because of this.

Interesting find, especially the part with the support for different cards.. Shamino must know something more..It is definitely gonna be an interesting year..

 

[nullpointerus]

Originally posted by: Aikouka

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
I just find it highly amusing that good old M$ advertises Vista/DX10 as being more efficient and therefore faster than XP, yet the graphics vendors are having to work overtime just to get equivelant performance happening.

No great surprise though - blowing smoke up people's @rse is about the only thing m$ truly excels at...

Ugh, quit parading the unnecessary hatred around. The reason it's taking so long for competent drivers is that the entire driver model is different from the Win9x or WinNT setup. If I remember correctly, the whole concept of a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) is gone, which is what the previous drivers were all based off of. So, the more drastic a change is, the more effort is required to facilitate the changes for those affected.

Exactly, and besides, games running on Vista don't necessarily use DX10. The game uses the API it was programmed to use. Since there is no implementation of DX10 for XP, and apparently no DX10 benchmarks (yet) for Vista, drawing conclusions about DX10's performance characteristics relative to XP/DX9 is silly.

 

[Gstanfor]

Vista still has a DX9 mode (which people have tested and found to be slower so far than Dx9 under XP). Aeroglass actually uses DX9.L, not Dx10 for its rendering.

I don't see why we should not criticize m$ for this. They are the ones who love to beat their chests about backward compatibility and their new versions of whatever being faster than the old version. It simply isn't true.

 

[miniMUNCH]

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
Vista still has a DX9 mode (which people have tested and found to be slower so far than Dx9 under XP). Aeroglass actually uses DX9.L, not Dx10 for its rendering.

I don't see why we should not criticize m$ for this. They are the ones who love to beat their chests about backward compatibility and their new versions of whatever being faster than the old version. It simply isn't true.

This would force everyone to get a DX10 card just to run Aero... that would've been like shooting themselves right between the eyes.

 

[Gstanfor]

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with using DX9.L for Aeroglass, just pointing out to those who wanted to bash my previous comments that Vista is currently slower in DX9 than XP (despite m$'s PR claims to the contrary) -- something that we ***CAN*** measure today.

 

[BFG10K]

I just find it highly amusing that good old M$ advertises Vista/DX10 as being more efficient and therefore faster than XP, yet the graphics vendors are having to work overtime just to get equivelant performance happening.

XP has been out for six years and vendors have been tweaking drivers for that long.

Are you really surprised that initial beta drivers for Vista are slower?

 

[ronnn]

Originally posted by: BFG10K

I just find it highly amusing that good old M$ advertises Vista/DX10 as being more efficient and therefore faster than XP, yet the graphics vendors are having to work overtime just to get equivelant performance happening.

XP has been out for six years and vendors have been tweaking drivers for that long.

Are you really surprised that initial beta drivers for Vista are slower?

Alot of people hung on to win 98, preferring gaming performance over windows 2000. Personally I am also more than a little skeptical at this time.

 

[tuteja1986]

They will not come in time for Vista offical Launch ...

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
I'm not saying there is anything wrong with using DX9.L for Aeroglass, just pointing out to those who wanted to bash my previous comments that Vista is currently slower in DX9 than XP (despite m$'s PR claims to the contrary) -- something that we ***CAN*** measure today.

A brand new operating system. No hardware abstraction layer. This means the software has to communicate directly with the hardware. Quite the departure from Win 9x/NT/2K/XP. I'd say that a few frames per sec slower in all games initially is not so bad. In fact, it's better than I thought it would be. When XP first launched, holy hell did it suck, for a lot of reasons. Very little vendor hardware support. I remember having to wait and wait for vendors to write drivers for hardware I already owned to support XP. I went from Windows 98SE to Millennium (Only used Millennium for about 8 minutes then said screw this noise) to Windows 2000, which was and still is an awesome OS. Vista will have the same handicaps at first launch and sometime thereafter. But why do I need to tell you this? You were around then right? What is soooooo different today? New OS will have bugs, issues, incompatabilities, etc., all which can be addressed accordingly in time.

Just like Nvidia taking so long for a Vista driver. Maybe it ain't as easy as we all think it is. New OS, new cutting edge hardware. Now make them work together. Takes time to perfect anything if it can be perfected at all. And we all know, nobodies perfect. ever.