NVIDIA Makes Laptop Graphics Drivers Available Online ... Finally

NVIDIA decided to give notebook users an early Christmas present today. It's a present notebook owners have kept on their wish lists since NVIDIA first started making graphics processing units (GPUs) for notebooks ... downloadable drivers on the NVIDIA website.

For years now the only way laptop owners could find notebook graphics drivers for NVIDIA GPUs was if the notebook manufacturer was kind enough to make the drivers available or to download unofficial "hacked" drivers from various websites (drivers that were often hacked together based on desktop GPU drivers). Consumers need these drivers in order to be able to take full advantage of the latest visual computing applications and games as well as to be able to restore GPU functions after a fresh install of Windows.

NVIDIA is now offering notebook users the option of downloading graphics driver updates and upgrades direct from NVIDIA.com for the first time. The driver update from NVIDIA will offer new features, improved application compatibility, and performance optimizations. The first web driver update from NVIDIA will extend NVIDIA "CUDA" technology to notebook GPUs. According to the official press release, "CUDA technology also moves physics processing to the GPU for new levels of realism in games and virtual worlds based on the market leading PhysX API."

Notebook manufacturers have historically only allowed graphics drivers to be offered directly from them. This was due to the fact that the drivers had to be customized in order to maintain the functionality of dedicated hotkeys, power management, and smooth suspend/resume in notebooks. NVIDIA claims to have worked diligently over the past year to "modularize its driver architecture" and "develop a unified driver install package" that not only works with laptops from all manufacturers but also maintains those specific model hotkeys and suspend and resume functionality.

The availability of "official" notebook drivers on the NVIDIA website couldn't come soon enough for many of our forum regulars, as our discussion forum members have posted literally hundreds of links to hacked drivers over the years. Let's hope these newly available drivers prove as helpful as they sound.

 

great news, hoping to see continued improvements in performance from these

 

Fantastic! I'm gonna check them out right now.

 

Nice! What is that second screenshot of, with the ipod in it?

 

Excellent, use official drivers for your lapy and avoid laptopvideo2go hacked drivers then xD.

Great news

 

That's BadaBoom, one of the many new applications that takes advantage of your computer's GPU to speed up the performance of the application ... if you have the new drivers that support it. Adobe Photoshop CS4 also uses GPU acceleration.

Our office staff thinks it's the new trend of productivity applications that use GPU acceleration that are making NVIDIA do this. Gaming enthusiasts have complained about the lack of standardized notebook drivers for years, but it wasn't until these new applications hit the market that notebook GPU manufacturers started to pay attention.

Software developers need a standardized driver architecture if they're going to create software that can take advantage of the GPU in order to boost the performance of the application.

 

It was a blessing to discover how to install desktop drivers as WHQL on a notebook, and now this.

Merry Christmas and thank you nVidia!

 

Thanks Jerry, I am looking into it now. I am aware of CS4s GPU harnessing but did not realize other apps such as this are already out there too. Now my interest is peaked. Cheers

 

Finally proper drivers from NVIDIA. No more mods. Updating now .

 

Do you install these the same way you install the LaptopVideo2Go drivers (i.e Driver Sweeper in Safe mode, reboot and install)? Or do you just update them over your current drivers?

Either way, this is good news!

 

NVIDIA said that 179.28 is BETA but actually it is WHQL!!

 

This is great news! Someone at Nvidia gets it finally. I will probably continue to download optimized drivers for my gaming needs, but I will definitely find these useful for non-gaming machines.

 

All I have to say is: ABOUT TIME!

 

CURSES... Still no news on Sony VAIO support.

I'm going to sit here and pray that now that NVIDIA has these drivers out, someone over at Sony will think about updating the Z's video driver to something newer than 174.xx T_T

 

That is how I did it. Still the driver is huge for x64 Vista .

 

Hopefully AMD/ATI will follow and make their own laptop gpu drivers...

 

This is great news. I'm hoping ATI follows suit.

 

Well it's probably not Nvidia that wasn't getting it-apparently the OEMs haven't wanted it, and Nvidia's had to fight them to try to do this. And thank goodness. COMPLETELY awesome. This should have happened in 1999.

Yeah, that SUCKS! What's going on? Sony's one of the only companies that's excluded? I wonder if that's Sony's doing? If so...why? Or is Sony doing something weird with the hardware or cooling that it's harder to support?

I was close to ordering a Sony AW...but now I may have to rethink that. I mean look that that, they apparently support APPLE'S hardware! And Asus...but not Sony?

 

Well, just ran 3dmark 06 and my got 9338. Up from 9168 from when I first tested right after getting the machine. Obviously, I wasn't careful to control every single variable, but definitely looks like an improvement with Nvidia's new drivers of the stock Sager ones.

 

Would these be better than the ones at laptopvideo2go? The latest drivers I see on the site are 180.48.

 

This is like, so yay!? You know? I mean, how long have we hoped for this?

Right?

Peace on earth, man.

 

Personally I'd either use these, or Nvidia's regular reference drivers over laptopvideo2go's inf or other files.

 

Old news - at least for my 7900GS. I've been able to download the latest driver off of the Nvidia website since August and it's been working perfectly fine for my notebook.

EDIT: After closer inspection, it looks like the Nvidia website simply created more categories for the video cards but literally did not add anything new. For example, back in August I would have to select "GeForce7 Go series" but now, I can just select "GeForce7 for Notebooks" instead. Both lead to the same driver that I've been using for a while.

 

whoohooo!!!! finally nvidia! but what about lv2go and dox's drivers?

 

Quick Question:

I have a NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics card. It has the same driver version since I bought my computer (about 3 months ago), which is 7.15.11.7553.

Why is this new firmware from NVIDIA version 179.28 ?

And is it worth updating?

thanks

 

Best NBR score.

 

I hope nVidia intends to keep the notebook drivers in step with the desktop drivers. These new drivers are still the 179 series while the 180 series has been WHQL certified and released for a month now. Not much point in supporting drivers for notebooks only to keep them a generation behind.

 

So does this mean anything for the 8xxx series of defective gpu's?

 

Yes, it's worth updating, it's not firmware, it's a driver, and for some reason they list driver versions differently.

It's still a huge step though. I'm just thrilled to see it.

 

I was using 167s so....

 

Hmm, I wonder why?

Guess I'm sticking to LV2G then.

 

exactly how specialized are these drivers usually? i'm kinda new to the dedicated gpu in a notebook scene. like what kind of modifications do oem add, and are the changes significant?

 

The OEM drivers have enhancements for hotkeys and similar. But nVidia has said that those hotkeys and other functions provided by the OEM would still be preserved while the driver is updated. This is what I read from the news reports and nVidia announcements.

 

Is that really it? Are there any cases where like GPU fans are controlled by the drivers rather than the system, so you'd need special drivers?

I'm hearing with reference drivers on the newest Macbook Pro, the fan doesn't ramp up correctly when using laptopvideo2go stuff. On the 2007 Macbook Pros though using Nvidia's desktop reference drivers the fan DID still ramp up correctly from what I could tell.

 

2nd That! :yes:

We've hoped for a long time..and now it's happening!

Cin

 

Thank god for all those threats .

 

Well poop. *owns a Vostro*

 

You need a modified inf . Talk to DOX and the gang .

 

I wonder if there is any benefit using these over the DOX drivers? I'd imagine for a gaming laptop, it would still be beneficial using modified drivers (plus the DOX drivers have the best image qulity i have ever seen)

 

DOX drivers will always be better than Nvidia's reference drivers. (Props to DOX). But...

Say you have a lappy with Blu-ray? You might need the Nvidia ref drivers or the OEM driver to maintain playback functionality.

 

It's hard to say because I think logically modified drivers must give up something in order to get your performance increase or else why would Nvidia give you a driver that isn't very good? I think with desktop drivers, modifying them makes sense because there are a lot of stuff in desktops that we might not need in a laptop. However, the same can't be said to laptop drivers because they're made for laptops. I doubt the performance increase, if any, will be more than a couple of fps

 

Excellent news, installing right away. Hopefully everything works ok.

 

Where are my quadro drivers?!

 

They got drivers too for the quadro

http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook_drivers.html

My original nvidia driver is 175.53 for geforce 9600m gt. I'm downloading the latest beta for my gpu 179.28.

Hopefully i could play better crysis wars xD without decreasing my options.

 

that's for quadro nvs, not quadro fx.

 

What? I wasn't aware the GPU I was using was defective, or of any problems with the series. But I have been "out of the loop" for almost a year. Anywho... updating now : )

 

So do we see any improvement?

 

No Thinkpad support either

 

And no support for 9400M, used in MacBooks by Apple. Apple probably didn't allow it. Why I am not surprised.

 

Has anyone tried the driver? How's it compared to the one from www.laptopvideo2go.com?