M11x R1 GPU driver question

Hey people, I am a new owner of the M11x R1. I just reformatted it and am now running the 301.42 driver from Nvidia's website (it is the latest for our card).

Switching is disabled in the non-Dell drivers, I know this from reading the threads. I have already changed my BIOS setting to discrete. And if I change it to switchable, it runs on the iGPU only.

My question is this:

There are 2 versions of drivers on Dell's site, and the latest Nvidia one's.

a)Which would you people recommend for games?

b)which is more stable in terms of switching GPU's? (obviously the Nvidia ones will not switch)

c) I play MW3 and UT3 and Track mania. Will there be a performance drop if I downgrade to the older Dell drivers?

d) some people mentioned that the latest drivers only offer substantial updates for the latest cards, not our old cards. If this is the case, will the newer Dell driver be comparable to the latest Nvidia drivers?

e) I also have this weird problem where every time I restart or resume from sleep, I get 4 driver installations for the Nvidia HD audio. I ended up fixing this by uninstalling them from device manager and disabling driver update's from windows update. This fixed it but I am no longer able to get any more drivers from windows update, otherwise they will start installing again. Nobody else has this problem with the latest Nvidia drivers?

Thanks for any feedback guys!!! this is my 1st Nvidia PC, all my other's are ATI

 

I would recommend installing the most current video driver from the Dell Support website. Unfortunately, Dell will not be able to support drivers that aren't designed or intented to be run on the machine.

Thanks,
Gabe

 

I've played UT3 on the stock Dell drivers. Performance wasn't all that great, unless I switched the game to DirectX9 mode.

 

So there is no real advantage in using the latest Nvidia driver(301) vs the Dell 263.08?

I hear about people having tons of switching problems where the icon and the fn+f6 will not work. Is this still a problem now in 2012?

I wouldn't mind using the Dell drivers if my game performance is the same and I can switch GPU's.

What about performance in MW3? Will MW3 run the same for both?

Edit: I just checked and the Dell driver was released in March while MW3 was released in November.

Thanks for the replies.

 

It depends if the latest patches have fixed an issue or released an update which is relevant to you personally. If not, then no you will not see a difference.

And yes, using drivers past the ones on the Dell site will still prevent you from GPU switching.

 

Well, I just switched to the Dell drivers, and found that MW3 runs just fine. I have yet to try BF3 but some people have said that newer drivers are a must to run that game properly. Will experiment with some newer and older games too.

I remember when the Crysis 2 beta leaked. I ran it on my(another)PC and it could barely run it at 640x480. Then an update came out for the driver and I could run it at 1080p flawlessly. This was with ATI. I hope I do not come across the same issue with Nvidia. At least there are 0 drawbacks of updating with ATI, unlike Nvidia where old games are not supported. I cannot even run Nail'd now on my 11x

 

I know, I hate it when NVidia doesn't work on an old game! The ones I have the most problems with are back from the early 2000s, mainly DirectX 7 titles. I have an old desktop running an NVidia 5900 XT card and 2x Voodoo 2 cards in SLI mode, so that covers all my bases there. As much as I love NVidia, I wish they would get some legacy support going here so I don't have to have three desktops sitting around. (I really need to sell some of my old junk- er treasured retro systems)

 

HAHA, old PC's are very useful because 5 years from now, when you sell it for parts, people would pay a lot for stuff no longer in production. Take RAM for example, a 4GB DDR2 stick costs more than a 8GB DDR3 stick.

back to the driver topic, are there any modded driver for the iGPU? I cannot even play 720p videos properly without pixelation

 

The later intel GPU drivers are pretty good (I thought).

 

Did you download them from the Dell website or something? I just let windows update find the driver for me.

I have bee trying to get my hands on the modded driver. But that seems to be rather difficult as the links are dead.

 

Do not use windows update on vid drivers for R1. I think there was mention of that here somewhere.

For MY system I'm using the optimus drivers which are different from the ones you are using.

 

I let windows update find the driver for me, then I installed the Dell drivers onto that. Now I have my Hybrid working fine. The intel driver is 8.17

I would have liked to try out Optimus, but the intel card is beyond useless unless you are just surfing or working. I cannot even play any of my videos properly on the intel card (I have DXVA enabled).

And plus, I read on notebookcheck that the 335M and 4500MHD consume about the same power in idle, but the 335M consumes 20W more under load. The 335M can scale down when it is not under load, so I see no point in using Optimus. Even as I type this, I am monitoring the 335M and I can see that it is in the lowest clock state. All of this and I have not seen a single BSOD or game crash.