Just saw the announcement of another Forceware driver today, but not unless you have a GeForce 8xxx series card :(. There’ve been a few of these recently, but the last driver update for my poor old 7600GS was in November :(.
Anyone heard anything about this? Have they abandoned any further improvements for anything short of the 8xxx series?
I think right now they’re doing a massive focus on their Vista drivers for everything other than their 8xxxx series, and working on both Vista and XP drivers for the 8xxx series.
I can kind of see why this focus is currently in effect, as the drivers for their other lines of cards are really quite mature under XP. In a way I’m glad they are working on Vista more than the rest, because I’d like to see some better performance under Vista right now, especially for windowed 3d gaming.
No kidding that the 7 series is being abandoned (especially under XP). Not one official driver update since freaking NOVEMBER. WTF? I have a 7800GT and I’m hoping and praying I’m not just boned if some new game doesn’t display correctly in the next few months.
Dell hasn’t released any driver updates for the 7800gtx-go in my laptop since last June, but everything I’ve played seems to work just fine. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it, etc etc etc.
I guess I don’t understand the complaint really. If all your games are working, driver updates really aren’t necessary.
Your card is old, get over it. ;)
…and in six months the current greatest is old ;)
I had to install a hacked driver for my 7950 GT on the weekend - a higher version than the last official release (93.71, Nov 06) - in order to resolve a gfx corruption issue with Oblivion. They just modify the .inf file packaged with the drivers so that the setup will recognise your card.
Partial list of known issues from the last nVidia WinXP driver released six months ago for pre-8x00 series video cards, taken from the release notes:
[ul][li]Dark Messiah of Might and Magic–light flickers on the weapons and characters, and the system freezes after a period of gameplay.[/li][li]FEAR–reflection in the puddle flickers.[/li][li]Lock On: Modern Air Combat–graphics corruption occurs.[/li][li]With an HDTV connected to the component-out, the driver does not detect the HDTV setting and instead sets the TV format to NTSC.[/li][li]There is no display in Clone mode when TV is switched from Component to Composite.[/li][li]NVIDIA Control Panel: The S-Video-NTSC/HD Component format is not preserved after switching the primary displays.[/li][li]NVIDIA Control Panel: Unable to run the NVIDIA Multiple Display wizard with any nView multi-display mode enabled.[/li][li]Memory clocks displayed do not reflect DDR multiplier. The memory clocks themselves are running at the correct speeds.[/li][li]NVIDIA Control Panel Category Pages: Foreign language text exceeds the boundary of category windows.[/li][li]NVIDIA Control Panel Category Pages: Japanese translation issues exist in the menu options.[/li][li]Interlaced HDTV formats cannot be set in the NVIDIA Control panel.[/li][li]The NVIDIA Control Panel: After selecting HD Component 480i/576P/720 format, the Color Quality slider in the Change Resolution page is grayed out.[/li][li]There may be intermittent application compatibility issues with dual core CPUs.[/li][li]Video color-space range for DVI-only outputs is erroneously set to standard mode (16-235) instead of extended mode (0-255).[/ul][/li]Doesn’t sound so bad, until you remember these are just the issues listed in the release notes: i.e., stuff they knew about when they first released the drivers. I’m sure in the last six months, other issues have cropped up. And that’s not counting the usual raft of performance tweaks and the like which users expect from regular driver updates. Compared to ATI, which AFAIK has continued issuing WinXP driver updates on a regular basis, I can understand why nVidia customers are a little sore.
Can’t you just install the latest Nvidia ForceWare drivers and it’ll work fine? I have a 7900 GTO and under Vista I just update my drivers everytime they come out with a new one. The 158 series should run fine on a GeForce 7-series.
Kunikos: the new XP drivers are just for the 8x00 series; they haven’t updated the XP drivers for their earlier video cards since November, which is what Papageno et al were complaining about.
Did they fix the Counter-strike source fog bug in the 8800 series yet?
Does everyone really update their video drivers whenever a new version appears? I recently bought a new rig with a 8800GTS and everything seems to work fine. Then a couple of weeks ago I saw that a new version of Forceware had come out (uninstalled the old drivers and everything first) so I tried that. The first thing I did was watch a divx encoded video file and the video stuttered a lot. I switched back to the original drivers and everything works fine again. So what’s up with stuff like that?
I usually update my drivers every second release or so, if there’s something new in terms of features, or if there are bug fixes. I’ve been waiting for a new release for my 7800 GTX, but by the time it comes along I’ll be on my next card anyway (and into Vista, likely).
I just want ATI to jump back in with a DX10 card for some competition. NVidia’s just chewing up the market with those 88xxs and are getting away with what appears to be pretty poor support.
It depends: I try to read up on new drivers first, find out what fixes or improvements are supposed to be included. It also depends on whether or not I have any issues which I want resolved.