Nvidia's Unified Drivers are back!

[SniperDaws]

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_174.74.html

Supports GeForce FX, 6, 7, 8, and 9 series GPUs including these newly released GPUs:
GeForce 9800 GX2
GeForce 9600 GT
GeForce 8300
GeForce 8200
GeForce 8100/NVIDIA nForce 720a
NVIDIA nForce 730a
Supports single GPU and NVIDIA SLI? technology on DirectX 9 and OpenGL.
Adds new PureVideo HD features for GeForce 9800 GX2 and 9600 GT:
Dynamic Contrast Enhancement
Dynamic Blue, Green & Skin Tone Enhancements
Dual-Stream Decode Acceleration*
Improved performance on many DirectX 9 and OpenGL applications.
Numerous game and application compatibility fixes. Please read the release notes for more information on product support, features, driver fixes and known compatibility issues


---



sorry for my contribution to this thing getting off topic ... there's way too much non sense going on in here to really salvage it ... we could start like 3 other threads about all this stuff.

if anyone cares to carry on a part of this discussion, feel free to start a thread about it. for now, i don't think this one is doing anyone any good.

DerekWilson
Forum Administrator

 

[SniperDaws]

Anyone got anything to say about them then ?

 

[Canterwood]

Well its about time we had something!

 

[BadRobot]

do they work, and if people download them to their laptop will it break it?

 

[Lazlo Panaflex]

No issues with them yet. Oblivion hasn't crashed either. Gonna try Far Cry, & some older stuff like Undying, AvP2, etc.

@BadRobot - nah, they won't break anything permanently..you can always roll back to the previous drivers.

 

[Ackmed]

This is good news for people with older cards. A step I very much like. The bad news is, almost 30% of all Vista crashes are due to NV's drivers. Maybe if they would stop putting out so many beta versions each month, and actually have some official drivers every month, it would go down. And not "official beta" (how can they be official and beta at the same time..) drivers either. As topic around here say.

Microsoft's data strongly indicates that the problems were real. According to documentation on page 47 of the PDF, NVIDIA drivers were the cause of over 479,000 crashes, or just under 29 percent of all the crashes Microsoft logged. Microsoft's own drivers follow, at 17.9 percent, and the "Unknown" category takes third place at 17 percent. ATI is in fourth place (9.3 percent) and Intel in fifth place (8.83 percent).

http://arstechnica.com/news.ar...gy-nvidia-drivers.html

 

[Piuc2020]

Official and Beta don't contradict each other, official just means it's an acknowledged release coming from NVIDIA, beta means it's not a completely tested, finished or WHQL driver.

The only beef I have with nvidia drivers currently is under Vista, I have a widescreen monitor and it annoys me so much not being able to select scaling with fixed-aspect ratio on the drivers, though on the other hand on XP, my FPS went up a little bit on the GPU_Benchmark on Crysis, nothing major but definitely a difference that can be attributed to drivers.

I'm wondering though, when are those new PureVideo features going to be enabled on G92 8800 cards? I'm sure there is no hardware limitation so is NV ever going to release those features or they will keep them artificially limited to the 9 series cards?

 

[Tempered81]

scaling available with fixed aspect ratio through RT, no?

 

[Engineer]

Doesn't fix the stuttering issue with UT2004 (even though I thought it initally did). NVidia fixed this issue in Vista over a year ago and has yet to fix it in XP? Hmmmmm....

 

[taltamir]

hardly "unified" as the unified used to be TNT2 through geforce 7...

You still CAN take any nvidia driver and just plug in an INF and get the latest driver on your old card. Its not supported, but due to the unified structure of the drivers it will still work.

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/
They make an inf with all the discreet and laptop GPUs from nvidia. just put it in a matched driver and enjoy.

read this explanation:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/...dex.php?showtopic=8128

 

[Hauk]

Resolved a screen blanking issue with the Witcher and improved SLI scaling. Like the Restore button. Nice set..

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: Ackmed
This is good news for people with older cards. A step I very much like. The bad news is, almost 30% of all Vista crashes are due to NV's drivers. Maybe if they would stop putting out so many beta versions each month, and actually have some official drivers every month, it would go down. And not "official beta" (how can they be official and beta at the same time..) drivers either. As topic around here say.

Microsoft's data strongly indicates that the problems were real. According to documentation on page 47 of the PDF, NVIDIA drivers were the cause of over 479,000 crashes, or just under 29 percent of all the crashes Microsoft logged. Microsoft's own drivers follow, at 17.9 percent, and the "Unknown" category takes third place at 17 percent. ATI is in fourth place (9.3 percent) and Intel in fifth place (8.83 percent).

http://arstechnica.com/news.ar...gy-nvidia-drivers.html

Ackmed:

Might help to note that:

1. About everything under the sun (from PSU overheats to RAM OCing) reports to Vista as a display driver error.

2. Most people have NVIDIA based graphics cards, they have over 70% of the discrete market. (so it makes sense they'll have the most "driver errors")

This article puts the ratio of NVIDIA to ATi marketshare at 90% to 10% before the 3800s, and 70% to 30% after.

If you have 90% of the market, you're going to have the most reported errors.

 

[Pabster]

Originally posted by: nRollo
If you have 90% of the market, you're going to have the most reported errors.

Exactly.

 

[videopho]

174.74 has made remarkedly significant improvement over my newly purchased card 8800 gts 512.
see this link

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: nRollo
Ackmed:

Might help to note that:

1. About everything under the sun (from PSU overheats to RAM OCing) reports to Vista as a display driver error.

2. Most people have NVIDIA based graphics cards, they have over 70% of the discrete market. (so it makes sense they'll have the most "driver errors")

This article puts the ratio of NVIDIA to ATi marketshare at 90% to 10% before the 3800s, and 70% to 30% after.

If you have 90% of the market, you're going to have the most reported errors.

One thing you missed is under Vista a driver crash does not necessarily mean a blue screen or a hard crash. In fact hard crashes were only a tiny percentage of that 30% of the crashes reported.

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: SniperDaws
Anyone got anything to say about them then ?

Yes.

These had better support portrait mode.

Would also be nice if i could alt tab outta UT3 without crashing 75% of the time, but i imagine that'd be too much to expect.

Will install them in a bit.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: nRollo
If you have 90% of the market, you're going to have the most reported errors.

Exactly.

That's 90% of the add-in GFX card market.

90% of Vista users have an intel IGP. :light:

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: nRollo
If you have 90% of the market, you're going to have the most reported errors.

Exactly.

That's 90% of the add-in GFX card market.

90% of Vista users have an intel IGP. :light:

If you can back that statistic, I'll retract, but my thought is most of the early adopters of Vista were people who likely had more high end graphics than Intel integrated.

Also, just speculation here, but I doubt people with Intel integrated are doing anything that might cause a computer to crash. They have to disable Aero on some of them, they're not doing any kind of 3d gaming or content creation. My guess is mom n' pop didn't generate a lot of TDRs looking their retirement accounts with Windows Explorer, or writing a letter with MS Word. (they for sure weren't driving their PSUs to failure, OCing their RAM, running DX10 apps, and the other myriad of things that caused driver errors to be falsely reported)

 

[KBTuning]

This same driver set is available for Vista 64-bit as well for those who are wondering... im in the middle of downloading it right now

 

[Janooo]

Originally posted by: nRollo
...
Ackmed:

Might help to note that:

1. About everything under the sun (from PSU overheats to RAM OCing) reports to Vista as a display driver error.

2. Most people have NVIDIA based graphics cards, they have over 70% of the discrete market. (so it makes sense they'll have the most "driver errors")

This article puts the ratio of NVIDIA to ATi marketshare at 90% to 10% before the 3800s, and 70% to 30% after.

If you have 90% of the market, you're going to have the most reported errors.

90/10 is pure BS if they don't specify more info about market share.
For example Q3 of 2007. NV had 37.8% and AMD 17.5% of the desktop shipments. It's 70/30 before 38xx came out and it's 60/40 in Q4 of 2007 after 38xx were released.

 

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: Janooo

Originally posted by: nRollo
...
Ackmed:

Might help to note that:

1. About everything under the sun (from PSU overheats to RAM OCing) reports to Vista as a display driver error.

2. Most people have NVIDIA based graphics cards, they have over 70% of the discrete market. (so it makes sense they'll have the most "driver errors")

This article puts the ratio of NVIDIA to ATi marketshare at 90% to 10% before the 3800s, and 70% to 30% after.

If you have 90% of the market, you're going to have the most reported errors.

90/10 is pure BS if they don't specify more info about market share.
For example Q3 of 2007. NV had 37.8% and AMD 17.5% of the desktop shipments. It's 70/30 before 38xx came out and it's 60/40 in Q4 of 2007 after 38xx were released.

I don't see a link to that 60/40 split?

If anyone here cares about what happens with integrated graphics that would be included in the info you linked to, they should stop reading my posts now, because I could really care less what the "computers" with integrated graphics do. (with the exception of one interesting solution due on the market soon)

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: nRollo

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: nRollo
If you have 90% of the market, you're going to have the most reported errors.

Exactly.

That's 90% of the add-in GFX card market.

90% of Vista users have an intel IGP. :light:

If you can back that statistic, I'll retract, but my thought is most of the early adopters of Vista were people who likely had more high end graphics than Intel integrated.

Also, just speculation here, but I doubt people with Intel integrated are doing anything that might cause a computer to crash. They have to disable Aero on some of them, they're not doing any kind of 3d gaming or content creation. My guess is mom n' pop didn't generate a lot of TDRs looking their retirement accounts with Windows Explorer, or writing a letter with MS Word. (they for sure weren't driving their PSUs to failure, OCing their RAM, running DX10 apps, and the other myriad of things that caused driver errors to be falsely reported)

Seeing as you just threw that 70/30 stat out there, I decided to do the same with my 90% figure.

Your stat is obviously BS seeing as it's impossible that 0% of users use intel graphics.

Just about every laptop sold these days runs aero on Vista using intel graphics. The same goes for a large portion of business PCs sold through Dell and such.

 

[SniperDaws]

For fuck sake does every fucking thread need to turn into an "im better than you" argument.

Just download the drivers, install them, Smile and say Thanks you ungratful bunch of wankers.

 

[SickBeast]

Ok, some proper stats on graphics marketshare.

The desktop market is governed by Nvidia with 37.8% closely followed by Intel with 33.5%. AMD claims the third place with a drop to 17.5%. Since the second quarter this year, the desktop market registered a growth from 68.5% to 73.6%, with shipments of 72 million units. Meanwhile, the mobile market is dominated by Intel with a minor slide to 50.9%. AMD regained the second position with 23.4% and Nvidia comes in at 22.8%. Overall, the mobile market dropped down from 31.5% last quarter to 26.4%.

nRollo, how convenient of you to ignore the fact that more people use intel graphics than NV!

Check out the overall stats (desktop + notebook combined)

Intel has 43.5%, compared to 33.6% for NV.

 

[JustaGeek]

Originally posted by: SniperDaws
For fuck sake does every fucking thread need to turn into an "im better than you" argument.

Just download the drivers, install them, Smile and say Thanks you ungratful bunch of wankers.

:thumbsup: