Whatever happened to the days of NVIDIA touting their "unified driver achitechure"?

[Throckmorton]

Originally posted by: taltamir

Originally posted by: Throckmorton
Is nVidia going to screw 8 series owners by releasing drivers that only work on 9 series but not all G92?

most likely. I originally switched to nvidia cause their drivers covered more cards (TNT Through GF7 in one up to date driver). But now they are only updated the very latest cards.
And on motherboards things are even WORSE.

Too bad the AMD chipsets don't work with intel CPUs, and the intel chipsets have the worst drivers of all.

Maybe, with the popularity of 8800 G92 cards, someone will mod the drivers to work with them

 

[taltamir]

already happened. http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ makes modded inf files with all of nvidias card ever made, even the laptop chipsets one, to allow any version to install on any card(well... any "Mobile, TNT, Desktop, and Quadros", desktop means anything with the word geforce in it). And since the underlying driver architecture itself is still uniform, the newest drivers still work with older cards. In fact I am using the 174 drivers right now on my 8800GTS 512MB. And some years ago I used it to run 1xx on a GF 2 or something to get final fantasy 7 to render properly, its been years. I don't really remember .

But I don't like relying on a third party like that. If nvidia can't be bothered to release its own drivers, then I can buy an AMD card (just like how I never considered the omega drivers seriously).

AMD is now also opening up their specs to allow true open source drivers for their cards. That is another big advantage. Now I am under NO illusion that they are doing it out of the kindness of their heart. AMD has been between a rock and a hard place the last year. So they have been trying address any and all long standing customer issues that they could think of in a desperate attempt to garner customer loyalty. While I don't do the "customer loyalty" thing easily. I am taking note of their improvements. And the fact that those improvements have put their drivers ahead of nvidia's. Now if they were only able to produce hardware that is at a similar level of power I would switch in a heartbeat. But nvidia's current hardware superiority coupled with only minor advantages to ATIs software makes it a hard switch for me to make...