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Vista WHQL graphics drivers appearing
Author: Brett ThomasPublished: 20th February 2007
Finally, some support - NVIDIA's most recent drivers (100.65) are 8800 WHQL certified. ATI will be, too.
AMD has announced that it will have the drivers for its upcoming R600 graphics card WHQL certified before the chip even hard-launches at CeBIT. This means that the card will be ready for system builders and gamers alike to start using on the day of the launch, a pretty notable achievement. This is another feather in the cap of AMD, which has already had pretty robust support for ATI's entire graphics line and technologies since Vista's launch on January 31st.
NVIDIA is also joining the WHQL party, releasing its new 100.65 driver today. This is the first driver to take the 8800 series out of the 'beta' stage, and is a welcome move for system builders. Companies who participate in several of Microsoft's marketing programs cannot ship products that aren't WHQL certified in order to make sure that users get a decent Vista experience, so the 8800 has been off-limits.
The WHQL driver is good news, but there is no new word on the 6 and 7 series SLI debacle aside from "the next beta." Hopefully we will see that appear in the next week or so, which would be in line with the current beta releases (once every fortnight, give or take).
Have you got a thought on the matter? Let us hear about it in our forums.
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Comments (13)
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but im still waiting for my 7900GT SLI driver ;) i want to play SupremeCommander "the way its meant to be played", dammit!
shame
I'll play "Fanboy's Advocate" for a second: Perhaps it just shows that nVidia spent more time on hardware development for existing systems (DX10-capable hardware, that runs quite perfectly on XP), while AMD/ATI were slower with their hardware so they could develop "future" (Vista-ready) drivers sooner.
Really, I think we all wish that we had the best of both worlds -- new hardware developed as quickly as NVidia did with the 8800, and drivers developed for Vista in a timely fashion as AMD/ATI is doing.
On another note: I've heard bad things about ATI's past driver development -- but my only point of reference is an ATI HDTV Wonder TV-tuner card I got a few years ago -- Anybody wondering if there's an AMD influence on how quickly ATI's drivers will be released (perhaps the AMD management pushed for it?)?
(Regarding the HDTV Wonder: ATI was terrible with the software development, actually having software updates that introduced bugs that ruined the TV-watching experience, and then taking several months to release an upgrade that actually fixed the problem. During that several months, I was in constant contact with their tech. support, and they had me installing/uninstalling/reinstalling their drivers (and upgrades along the way that didn't fix the problem)...each of the uninstall/reinstall processes took about an hour and a half because of the way the drivers were set up (several files to uninstall, with manually deleting files, and several files to reinstall, including the need for the original CD). They wasted tons of my time, finally released a version that worked better, never pointing out that it was indeed something they changed that caused the problem in the first place -- implying instead that I was going through their 14-page uninstall/reinstall procedure incorrectly.)
Hehe... Nvidia is holding up my vista upgrade too.. I'm not going to play wow unless its at 2560x1600 and I'm not going to buy a 8800...
BTW a pair if 7800's both overclocked to 470 and 1200 isnt enough all the time. Ramparts brings this thing to its knees to about 15 fps...
Never seen wow bring anything but the worst hardware to 15fps
I just want some final drivers already..
2560x1600 is a big size up from 1680x1050
Hold on, the 7800GTX is the equivalent of the X1900XT isn't it .... so the 7800GT is somewhere under that .. - believable then i guess :p
When it comes to larger resolutions, you need more memory it seems, its not a big deal on the processing power but the memory requirements grow a lot (especially if you want to do AA/AF)
With the 100.64 drivers, it would hardly load, getting as far as the 'loading map/optimizing shaders' screen, then hanging for like 5 minutes before offering me the 'join now' button, then hanging for another five monutes before evntually getting maybe 1 frame every 2 or three seconds.
I now get 25-30 FPS with the same settings as in XP - on my 1440x900 panel, i suspect the only reason i'm not getting more is because my card isn't overclocked under vista - and under XP it goes right up to 654/810. Vista i'm stuck at 500/700. Thats quite a big deficit.