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New drivers for Windows XP and Vista users

This morning NVIDIA released new drivers for Windows Vista and XP users for GeForce 6 and newer graphic processors. The Windows Vista drivers are up to ForceWare Release 158 version 158.24 while Windows XP users are stuck with ForceWare Release 90 version 94.24.

The new Windows Vista Release 158 drivers increase 3D performance in applications, add PureVideo HD support, DirectX force vertical sync and an updated NVIDIA Control Panel. The driver supports DirectX 9, DirectX 10 and OpenGL APIs for single-GPU GeForce 6, 7 and 8-series configurations. NVIDIA only supports DirectX 9 and OpenGL on GeForce 6, 7 and 8-series SLI configurations.

GeForce 8 SLI users that want to take advantage of DirectX 10 support are steered towards the version 158.43-beta drivers. As with all driver releases, the latest ForceWare WHQL release has game and application compatibility fixes.

The Windows XP release 90 drivers add support for the new GeForce 7200 GS. The new driver supports PureVideo HD hardware acceleration of H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 high-definition video formats. NVIDIA has also improved video post-processing and added HDCP support for DVI and HDMI connectors. NVIDIA updates the new Control Panel as well.

Download the new drivers from NVIDIA for Windows XP, Windows Vista 32-bit and Windows Vista 64-bit.

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By MartinT on 6/2/2007 2:40:43 PM , Rating: 4
Having a buggy monitor recognition routine in your drivers half a year after Vista was RTM is not cool. Limiting those unfortunate enough to experience those issues to a single output at 1024x768 is frustrating. Not even acknowledging the problems in your release notes is offensive.

I'm sick and tired of the state of NVIDIA's Vista x64 drivers. If AMD offered a viable alternative to the 8800GTX I've been using since November, I'd switch in a heartbeat.




By FITCamaro on 6/3/2007 8:52:29 AM , Rating: 2
An 8800 series card will only output at 1024x768 in Vista 64-bit? I ask because I'm going to help a friend build a PC and he wants to use Vista 64-bit.


By Haltech on 6/3/2007 5:35:59 PM , Rating: 2
Something is probably wrong with his monitor aka only goes to 1024x768. Vista x64 does work with higher resolutions


By MartinT on 6/4/2007 2:43:22 AM , Rating: 4
quote:
Something is probably wrong with his monitor aka only goes to 1024x768.
No, Mr Smartpants, that's not the problem.

My displays work fine under Vista x64 when connected through VGA.
My displays work fine, connected via DVI, on the same PC under WinXP.
My displays work fine, connected via DVI or VGA, using a Radeon card in the same PC, under both WinXP and Vista x64.

Only the combination of 8800 GTX, Vista x64, and the two TFTs connected digitally results in one display in 1024x768 fallback, and the other not recognized at all.


By MartinT on 6/4/2007 2:36:07 AM , Rating: 2
It's probably a problem with the part of Nvidia's driver that reads the monitor's resolution and refresh rate support information (EDID), and uses it to show the applicable options in the control panels.

Apparently, this doesn't work correctly with a number of DVI-connected displays under Vista x64, resulting in a bad fall-back mode that only enables resolitions up to 1024x768.

I don't know if anyone ever compiled a list of displays that are victim to this bug, or if it is even connected to any specific displays at all, but I guess you should check the Internet if anyone has experienced the issues with the display your friend is likely to use.

And just to be sure, this bug seemingly only effects DVI-connected displays, if you're using an old CRT or any other VGA-connected device, you should be fine.


By donttrustme on 6/4/2007 3:42:19 AM , Rating: 1
Dude don't mind me saying this....but if you really want to install drivers that really(somewat) work then i suppose u might have to take a risk by installing the drivers tht are present in Guru3D.com.


By MartinT on 6/4/2007 4:19:43 AM , Rating: 3
I don't think there's a single set of Vista x64 drivers available (since 100.65, supposedly), from nvidia.com, nzone.com, guru3d.com, or otherwise, that doesn't have the monitor detection bug.

Quite frankly, after over half a year, I'm well past the point of hoping for Nvidia to fix the issue. I just wish AMD had something on-par with my GTX.


By RMSe17 on 6/4/2007 10:34:15 AM , Rating: 2
That's partially why it's good to stay with 32bit version of Windows.


Vista sleep problem
By ali 09 on 6/2/2007 7:26:49 PM , Rating: 2
What I can't believe is that nVidia still haven't fixed the Vista sleep issue. It is really annoying, as I want to put my computer in sleep mode, but it won't boot up again. They have recognised it as a problem, but have not fixed it. How long have they had access to Vista for? 6 and a bit months. I don't think that is good enough.




RE: Vista sleep problem
By elpresidente2075 on 6/2/2007 11:22:58 PM , Rating: 3
I'm fairly certain that they've had access to vista longer than 6 months. In fact, I'd be willing to bet they have had access to vista for nearly a year so far, since the public betas came out near the end of last year.

It is definitely frustrating, since it seems that entire industries (and gamers especially) look to the graphics market for the state of driver development for vista. But at least most of one company's driver's features work, which is unfortunately more than can be said about ATI's drivers, always a sad disappointment to me and my ATI-based laptop.

Here's to wishing that these companies would get on the ball!


RE: Vista sleep problem
By griffynz on 6/3/2007 11:20:37 PM , Rating: 2
So what sleep problem? Hardware etc?

I had a problem with my 8800gts and 650i (would sleep but all fans spun) but all that was sorted out in March, mine sleeps (all dead but green power light flashes) and restarts to log on menu.


158.45 also out
By titan7 on 6/3/2007 4:21:44 AM , Rating: 1
With big d3d10 speed improvements. These old official drivers don't even work correctly with Company of Heroes in d3d10 mode.




RE: 158.45 also out
By FITCamaro on 6/3/2007 8:53:03 AM , Rating: 1
Company of Heroes isn't a DX10 game...


RE: 158.45 also out
By overzealot on 6/3/2007 10:24:57 AM , Rating: 3
It's got a DX10 version, which improves lighting (slightly)


RE: 158.45 also out
By techfuzz on 6/3/2007 2:06:06 PM , Rating: 2
The latest patch enables DX10 in Company of Heroes.


XP 64-bit
By mizkitty on 6/2/2007 10:18:00 PM , Rating: 1
Some of us are forced to use Beta drivers...
If you're running XP-64 and a GeForce 7800GT the last Official driver available is Nov 2, 2006.
I have a Vista 64 Ultimate DVD sitting here unused because Vista won't recognize my RAID.
I'd rather keep using XP64 than spring for a new mobo/CPU/RAM/video at this point.




RE: XP 64-bit
By overzealot on 6/3/2007 4:01:07 AM , Rating: 2
Uh huh. Or you could copy the nv4disp.inf from one of the beta versions into the official release 8800 xp64, then install that?


RE: XP 64-bit
By FITCamaro on 6/3/2007 8:50:14 AM , Rating: 1
He said Vista won't recognize his RAID configuration. Again, a problem with manufacturers not releasing new drivers but has nothing to do with Nvidia.


RE: XP 64-bit
By overzealot on 6/3/2007 10:19:12 AM , Rating: 2
The title was XP 64-bit. He complained about the last official GF6 driver. I switched off when he started talking about Vista and raid (they both don't interest me).


Driver confusion
By PurdueRy on 6/2/2007 4:08:51 PM , Rating: 2
So this update does not apply to a person with a 8800GTS with Win XP? I went to their website and followed the normal approach to get to the winXP driver for 8*** series cards and its a 158 version. I assume this 98 version would be a step backwards right?




RE: Driver confusion
By Devo2007 on 6/2/2007 5:03:12 PM , Rating: 2
The 98 version won't work on your 8800....you need the 158 version.


xp 64bit
By dajeepster on 6/2/2007 12:54:37 PM , Rating: 1
no geforce 6 drivers for WinXP 64 bit... only geforce 7 and 8... i'm not upgrading my geforce 6 yet... they still work for battlefield 2142... I had to upgrade my AMD64 3000 to a dual core Opteron 175 though... i was started to take frame hits with the last update, and that was just with playing the game offline. my cpu is no longer the bottleneck... hopefully my video cards will last a while longer.




RE: xp 64bit
By overzealot on 6/3/2007 3:54:35 AM , Rating: 2
Just modify the GeForce 8 ones like everyone else does...
There truely aren't many improvements for GF6 cards in the new drivers, though.


By Senju on 6/3/2007 11:56:21 PM , Rating: 3
I say this because the new drivers *SUCK* big time!
I can not believe that my 27 inch Dell Monitor was force to use a low resolution of 1024x768 in Vista. That is unexceptionable!!!!!

What the hell are they doing? Fix this *BUG* ASAP!!!!!!




By Deinonych on 6/2/2007 2:31:46 PM , Rating: 2
Nvidia hasn't released a new XP chipset driver for the 680i since November. It's pretty amazing that there hasn't been an update in seven months, especially given the problems some people have been having with 680i boards.




Where are we heading to ?
By crystal clear on 6/3/2007 4:44:27 AM , Rating: 2
We are all in a very clumsy situation-

A situation where SOFTWARE lags far behind HARDWARE.

1)WE have new hardware/products that promises you perfomances never seen before but fails to provide it, due lack of driver support.(software)

2)We have an O.S.(Vista) that promises you the best,but cannot provide you that again because of driver support.

3)We have Cpus that provide you with potentials never seen before from 2,4,8,CORES & MANY MORE CORES.
Again we lack the software to exploit the full potential of these Cpus/cores.

4) We have technology like DX10 but again very little supporting software to back up & neither ANY GAMES in that catergory.

The list is long - where Software & Hardware dont move together.

Intel is researching the "general purpose GPU (GPGPU)."

"Intel describes it as “discrete high end GPU” on a general purpose platform, using at least 16 cores and providing a “fully programmable performance of 1 TFlops.”

Do we have the SOFTWARE to EXPLOIT the full potential of these cores ?

That reminds me of this-

"Intel: Software needs to heed Moore's Law"

SAN FRANCISCO--After years of delivering faster and faster chips that can easily boost the performance of most desktop software, Intel says the free ride is over.

Already, chipmakers like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are delivering processors that have multiple brains, or cores, rather than single brains that run ever faster.
quote:
The challenge is that most of today's software isn't built to handle that kind of advance.

quote:
"The software has to also start following Moore's law," Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar said, referring to the notion that chips offer roughly double the performance every 18 months to two years. "Software has to double the amount of parallelism that it can support every two years."

Microsoft has recently been sounding a similar warning. At last week's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles, Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie tried to spur the industry to start addressing the issue.
quote:
"We do now face the challenge of figuring out how to move, I'll say, the whole programming ecosystem of personal computing up to a new level where they can reliably construct large-scale applications that are distributed, highly concurrent, and able to utilize all this computing power," Mundie said in an interview there. "That is probably the single most disruptive thing that we will have done in the last 20 or 30 years."


Earlier this week, Microsoft's Ty Carlson said that the next version of Windows will have to be "fundamentally different" to handle the amount of processing cores that will become standard on PCs. Vista, he said, is designed to handle multiple threads, but not the 16 or more that chips will soon be able to handle. And the applications world is even further behind.

"In 10 to 15 years' time we're going to have incredible computing power," Carlson said. "The challenge will be bringing that ecosystem up that knows how to write programs."

http://news.com.com/Intel+Software+needs+to+heed++...




Try again
By Verran on 6/4/2007 9:49:40 AM , Rating: 2
Just downloaded the new XP driver release for my 7800gt. Removed old drivers, installed, rebooted. I loaded up a game and within twenty minutes I had a blue screen and a hard reboot. Back to 93.71 I guess...




About time.
By pepsimax2k on 6/2/07, Rating: -1
RE: About time.
By Xavian on 6/2/2007 1:44:30 PM , Rating: 2
If i was you i would look up on nvidia beta drivers, nvidia operates differently from ATI in drivers, nvidia release a lot of betas and only release an official XP driver if a beta is found to be completely stable (110% stable even). ATi rarely releases betas to the public and releases a driver every month.

If you are interested in betas and tweaked drivers in general, go to www.tweaksrus.com, there you'll find out which drivers deliver the more performance, while maintaining stability.


RE: About time.
By sc3252 on 6/2/07, Rating: 0
RE: About time.
By Xavian on 6/2/2007 7:23:18 PM , Rating: 2
not really, as long as you read up on the beta drivers you'll save any such trouble.

I've been using tweaked beta drivers for my 6800GT pretty much for the entirety of its existence and my card has been fine.

Nvidia's beta drivers are far more stable then any normal beta driver. Sure you may get a blue-screen when playing a game if you use a bad driver, but an nvidia beta driver will NEVER damage hardware in a computer.


RE: About time.
By toyota on 6/2/2007 1:48:24 PM , Rating: 1
7 months? Maybe you should look in the Windows XP/2000 Driver Archive because there were several other official XP driver releases.


RE: About time.
By jmke on 6/2/2007 2:24:06 PM , Rating: 2
no way seven months;

158.22_forceware_winxp_english_whql.exe

is not 7 months old.


RE: About time.
By pepsimax2k on 6/2/2007 3:29:30 PM , Rating: 2
158.22 is an 8xxx series driver, i meant for 7 or lower which i presume most people have. and the last official non beta release for those was 93.71 from November 2nd 2006, at least that's what was listed on their driver download page until a few days ago.

that said, i'll start taking more notice of betas from now on :o\


RE: About time.
By toyota on 6/2/2007 4:03:02 PM , Rating: 2

Version: 91.85
Release Date: April 13, 2007
Operating System: Windows 2000/XP/MCE
WHQL Certified

Those were not betas and they were for 6 and 7 series.


RE: About time.
By GaryJohnson on 6/2/2007 6:27:24 PM , Rating: 2
I think you're looking at a Quadro driver there.


RE: About time.
By Belard on 6/2/2007 8:33:01 PM , Rating: 2
158.xx are Vista drivers for GF6~8 cards.

9x.xx drivers are for WindowsXP for same 6~8 cards.


RE: About time.
By BigLan on 6/4/2007 10:03:43 AM , Rating: 2
Strange... guru3dd has 158.xx series for win xp as well - I'm running a set on my htpc box with 7600gt.


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