DailyTech - New ForceWare Drivers for GeForce 8800-Series

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Software New ForceWare Drivers for GeForce 8800-Series
Anh Tuan Huynh (Blog) - April 6, 2007 7:26 AM

27 comment(s) - last by herrdoktor330.. on Apr 8 at 2:55 PM

New ForceWare drivers for GeForce 8800-series owners running Windows XP

NVIDIA has released new drivers for its GeForce 8800-series GPUs. The new ForceWare release 95, version 97.94 (PDF) is only available for Windows XP 32-bit and 64-bit users. As usual, it introduces various games and application fixes.

NVIDIA has tweaked the PureVideo video processing a little bit with release 97.94. Tweaked inverse telecine and de-interlacing algorithms improve picture quality in standard and high definition video content. An HQV DVD benchmark score of 128, the highest score possible is 130, is achieved with the new driver release.

ForceWare 95, version 97.94 release highlights:

Supports GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS GPUs.
Game and application compatibility fixes. For more information on this driver, please view the Release Notes.
New PureVideo technology features allows GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS to achieve a score of 128 in the HQV video quality benchmark:

Improved inverse telecine algorithms (2:2 & 3:2 Pull-down Correction) for standard and high definition content.
Improved spatial-temporal de-interlacing algorithm (for standard and high definition content).

Includes the new NVIDIA Control Panel. Please visit the NVIDIA Control Panel website for more information.
Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0c and OpenGL® 2.1 support.

GeForce 8800-series users can download the drivers for Windows XP 32-bit and 64-bit from NVIDIA. Windows Vista users with GeForce 8800-series cards will have to use the previously released ForceWare release 100.65.

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#$%^

By HDBanger on 4/6/2007 2:52:50 PM , Rating: 4

Just installed these , and STILL NO overscan correction running dvi to hdmi on hdtv. Ive been waitin for months, have been forced to use first release drivers for a 400 dollar video card to play my games on HDTV. Done with Nvidia, goin back to ATI. Anyone wanna buy a 8800 gts 640 meg?

RE: #$%^

By darkpaw on 4/6/2007 3:12:47 PM , Rating: 4

Yah, Nvidia's drivers have just been complete shit. Come on, they haven't even updated their incomplete vista drivers in a month and a half (and thats for their main series cards).

My next purchase will definately be from ATI.

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RE: #$%^

By i4mt3hwin on 4/6/2007 3:43:09 PM , Rating: 2

It's sad because I switched from ATI to Nvidia because ATI's drivers were terrible, now it's been reversed.

Hopefully ATI's new card will push nvidia to compete with their drivers again.

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RE: #$%^

By herrdoktor330 on 4/8/2007 2:55:06 PM , Rating: 2

as they say, the grass is always greener on the other side. ATI Drivers are bad... nVidia drivers are bad... face it gang, both companies make equally bad drivers.

Here's an ATI horror story for you: I've tried updating drivers for a friend for an old 9700 All In Wonder. Did a complete uninstall and installed the current drivers. The ATI control panel crashed out and the tv in stopped working. I'm still working on a resolution for that one (albeit, I've been busy and haven't spent alot of time with it). Plus, ATI drivers for linux are absolute trash. I've tried getting basic 3D acceleration to work with ATI under Linux with only marginal success. Maybe I'm doing something wrong... but I doubt it. I've done fresh windows installs using new ATI drivers and still had problems with the ATI panel.

But the whole point of this post is that both companies need to spend some more time focusing on their drivers. Maybe if the product cycle of new videocards wasn't every 6 months, maybe we'd have drivers that work, eh? I understand the desire to rush these products to market, but how much better would they be if the drivers were, at minimum, mature enough for trouble-free operation with complete functionality?

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RE: #$%^

By aurareturn on 4/6/07, Rating: -1

RE: #$%^

By FITCamaro on 4/6/2007 4:38:03 PM , Rating: 1

Trade you my X1950XTX. :)

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RE: #$%^

By FITCamaro on 4/6/2007 4:47:19 PM , Rating: 1

Obviously meant to be a response to the top post.

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RE: #$%^

By Puddleglum1 on 4/6/2007 3:18:11 PM , Rating: 2

DVI to HDMI?

Why not work-around it just doing DVI to DVI or DVI to VGA?

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RE: #$%^

By ToeCutter on 4/6/2007 3:26:09 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
Why not work-around it just doing DVI to DVI or DVI to VGA?

HDMI has nothing to do with it. VGA isn't digital, DVI and HDMI are.

If you want to connect a GF8800 to a digital display, there is no way to natively adjust overscan, which is an absolute pain, as ALL current GF 6xxx and 7xxx drivers have overscan adj built-in.

Just another unfinished driver for the 8800 series...

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RE: #$%^

By ToeCutter on 4/6/2007 3:20:00 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
STILL NO overscan correction running dvi to hdmi on hdtv

Ugh. Thanks for the tip, got all excited for nothing.

A 128 HQV score with borders on the projjie? Nice.

I'm curious: Have you tried PowerStrip? It can be a pain, which is EXACTLY why I chose the 8800, seeing as how every GF card since the 6800 has overscan correction builtin to the driver.

I'm anxiously awaiting the R600 (And no, I'm not trolling here). It seems extremely HD friendly according to what I've read to far. HD Audio over HDMI (w/ HDCP) support on R600 is confirmed. I guess I'll look to ATI to solve my GeForce problems.

The 8800 seemed like the ticket when I bought it, but nVidia just hasn't delivered the goods due to sh*t drivers.

The same can be said of nForce 6xx (Google: "SATA issues nForce" to see what I'm talking about), which is why (thankfully) I chose the Intel 975XBX2 board for HTPC duties.

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RE: #$%^

By JarredWalton on 4/6/2007 3:40:08 PM , Rating: 2

Only problem is that AMD's drivers suck at overscan correction - even worse than NVIDIA's. I have never had a digital connection on an ATI/AMD card properly support overscan correction. Component does, but not digital. So now both companies can suck, right? Of course, I haven't tried ATI lately, so maybe I will one of these days... I currently have a 7600GT running my HDTV.

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RE: #$%^

By crystal clear on 4/6/2007 3:58:53 PM , Rating: 1

" but nVidia just hasn't delivered the goods due to sh*t drivers."

Quote-
No major issues at all

There has been a lot of controversy about Nvidia's Vista driver. We decided to give it a try and to try to install a few games under Vista Ultimate 64 bit under AMD Quad FX system, a really tricky and unique platform. We tried Nvidia's latest official WHQL 100.65 driver.

As we were not happy with only one card, we tried to plug two and give it a try. The good news is that SLI on two 8800 GTX cards works flawlessly and STALKER, Rainbow Six Vegas, Company of heroes and 3Dmarks works just fine.

Actually you can turn all the effects on, as we did in Stalker and we still got 40 to 60 FPS with all the possible lights and details on. Stalker is the best eye candy game in the industry today and it wants a lot of power. So please give Nvidia a break as the driver works even in dual screen mode, it also runs Video files including HD stuff just fine.

Ok I still have some criticism as the Nvidia driver control panel really sucks and its very user unfriendly but at the end it does the job. We will give you some more numbers soon, but the lab is simply overcrowded with super cool stuff.
http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_conte...

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RE: #$%^

By ToeCutter on 4/6/2007 4:57:20 PM , Rating: 3

quote:
No major issues at all

Um, yeah, right.

Except for the 19 open issues listed in the release notes for the 97.94's.

I haven't seen a single post here claiming the 8800 is slow, simply that the drivers suck.

With issues like "DVI blurriness" (as described in the release notes), it would seem that the drivers are a bit premature, as even my MacBook with crap Intel 950 can manage to display HD content over DVI at 720p......w/o any blurriness.

I doubt any one reading this post has any interest in your benchmark scores...

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RE: #$%^

By Ringold on 4/6/2007 5:35:00 PM , Rating: 2

Uh, okay, I'll claim that they're slow then. Not monsterously slow, but definitely one card (8800gts 640mb) that I suspect will see significant performance gains due to drive improvements.

They are also buggy, but mostly with independent, smaller games; I'm hesitant to shower blame on nvidia for that. Could be the games themselves, could be a lack of optimizations from Nvidia, both of which understandable.

Oh, and [H] reported on the same bug that drives me absolutely insane; the driver will randomly crash and recover right when gaming gets good, seemingly at random (random places in the game, random time intervals)

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RE: #$%^

By crystal clear on 4/7/2007 5:06:21 AM , Rating: 1

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1609

Try it works pretty well.

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RE: #$%^

By crystal clear on 4/7/2007 5:01:55 AM , Rating: 1

Your attitudes are not helpfull to you - you got to search around for solutions.
Yes solutions are available (thats what I believe)-so I did
some search for you-

Go to this link-Read it well

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1609

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RE: #$%^

By ToeCutter on 4/7/2007 1:06:33 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
Your attitudes are not helpfull to you

Oh, I'm apologize, I didn't realize that my comments would be perceived as a cry for help.

The last thing I need are hacked drivers from Guru3D (I'm familiar with the site). The drivers include no release notes and the .inf has been hacked to include support for the 8800 series. No way I'm installing them.

Besides, according to the feedback from those who have (on Guru3D forums), they do little more than add a few points to 3DMark scores (a worthy effort for nVidia's driver devs, I guess). Many posters there have reverted to the 97.95's after testing these.

More of the same...

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RE: #$%^

By darkpaw on 4/6/2007 11:17:50 PM , Rating: 2

SLI does not work for any cards prior to 8xxx series with the current release drivers and many popular games are completely unplayable (hello Civ4).

I'm happily using Vista on my dev machine, but my gaming machine is still running XP (even though I lose out on a gig of memory that way).

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Poor State of Nvidia's Vista Drivers

By abakshi on 4/6/2007 5:53:53 PM , Rating: 2

It's been, what, 4 months since RTM?, and Nvidia _still_ doesn't have properly working drivers for Vista.

I've been running a new HP dv9000t laptop that shipped with a C2D 2.0 / Geforce Go 7600 / Vista Ultimate x64 for a few weeks now, and Nvidia's drivers (original/100.65/latest beta/all) have been horrible. Same problems as on a desktop we've been running for months with a 7900GS - unstable, crashes quite often (mostly video driver resets - blank/frozen screen for 15-20 seconds - but sometimes BSOD). Problems are exacerbated when any 3D or GPU-intensive task is performed (video/Windows DreamScene/games/etc.), and it nearly always crashes when restoring from standby or hibernate.

This is not a new problem, and Nvidia _must_ be aware of this by now. Even the latest beta drivers do nothing to fix the major bugs ForceWare has in Vista. See this thread for just one example:

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=25381

By comparison, I've been running a Dell C2D E1705 with an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 that's been _far_ better under Vista. ATI's drivers, even 7-8 months ago running on Vista RC1, were far more stable than Nvidia's today running on RTM. Sure, there were initially game performance issues, and OpenGL is still not a strength, to say the least, but it's _nothing_ compared to what Nvidia's CrapWare drivers are like...

RE: Poor State of Nvidia's Vista Drivers

By Xavian on 4/7/2007 12:23:14 AM , Rating: 2

I hate to say this, but if you buy into a brand new operating system right after its released, the drivers and everything in general is gonna suck.

AMD/ATI's drivers suck for Vista and so do Nvidia's, Creatives Drivers suck also.

You have to give these companies time, since when Windows XP was released, drivers sucked too (why do you think a lot of gamers preferred windows 98 over XP for a while?)

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RE: Poor State of Nvidia's Vista Drivers

By hondaman on 4/7/2007 10:16:35 AM , Rating: 2

Time? lol.

Vista had been in development for 5 years. How much more time do hardware vendors need?

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RE: Poor State of Nvidia's Vista Drivers

By abakshi on 4/7/2007 3:45:11 PM , Rating: 2

Time is no excuse. It's been several months since RTM, and years if you go back to earlier stages of development/release - the Betas, RC1, RC2, etc.

ATI's Vista driver, while far from perfect, is worlds ahead of Nvidia's. It's stable and work well in Windows, whereas Nvidia's crashes all the time, often causing BSODs.

As I mentioned, ATI's Catalyst Vista driver 7 months ago under Vista RC1 was far better for normal Windows operation than Nvidia's ForceWare today.

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who reads subjects anyway.

By semo on 4/6/2007 3:16:27 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0c and OpenGL® 2.1 support.

what does that mean?

anywho, not so much news about graphics these days. no new f@h gpu clients. no mid range or low end dx10 cards. common amd, everyone is waiting for you and i don't just mean consumers.

RE: who reads subjects anyway.

By crystal clear on 4/6/2007 3:46:27 PM , Rating: 2

"not so much news about graphics these days"

Then here is some-

Quote-
You can not stop to leaks. Our Chinese colleagues got its hands on the real sample of 8600 GT card also known as G84-300 and they run all kind of tests. The site confirmed all the specs and clocks of the 8600 GTS and GT we wrote before. Still the most interesting part is that despite controversy G84 still works in AGP at least it should.

Both Geforce 8600 GTS and GT can be turned in AGP and this makes perfectly sense as all ATI's cards will work in AGP at least entry and mainstream DirectX 10 cards.

We were shocked to learn that 8600 GT loses in most of the tests against 7900 GS card but we are sure that 8600 GTS will save the day due to its superior clocks. 8600 GT is not much faster than 7600 GT card as well and that was the shocker. Well it is all on the site so please by my guest and read it.

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_conte...

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This info is behind

By alkolkin on 4/7/2007 10:36:47 AM , Rating: 2

First of all, the latest driver for Vista is now 101.41.

However, there is still a major problem that is noted in many blogs. In high resolution, it cannot run video on Windows Media Player without loosing connection to nvlddmkm.dll. Many times it reconnects, but eventually it blue screens. All attempts to correct following guidelines from bloggers and Pny have failed. It fails on three different motherboards I have, it fails with three different processors including Core 2 Quad Extreme.

I think it is the driver, but it may be that this board is not as capable as some think. I never get a response from Nvidia.

RE: This info is behind

By ToeCutter on 4/7/2007 1:14:20 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
I think it is the driver, but it may be that this board is not as capable as some think. I never get a response from Nvidia.

I hear you loud and clear.

I've pinged Valve and nVidia to determine what the hell is causing the problem with Source. Who's gonna fix it, Valve or nVidia? Neither has even acknowledged my request with even a canned response.

The Source bug only occurs on the 8800 series cards and manifests itself in all iterations of the Source engine. No other cards exhibit the rendering flaws produced by the 8800 series. The flaw is easily reproducable on Win XP, which has nothing to do with DX10.

Sorry folks, but if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it's a f*&king duck.

All the double talk in the world doesn't change the fact that the GeForce 8800 simply doesn't work as advertised...

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