ASUS W90Vp: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4870... with CrossFire
by Jarred Walton on May 29, 2009 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
NVIDIA Achieves Holy Grail of Drivers
Okay, it's time for a short tangent. Gary mentioned recently that NVIDIA posted new Windows 7 compatible drivers on their website. What he neglected to mention is that new drivers are also available for Windows Vista and XP. Note that all of these are "beta" drivers, so there may be a few bugs left to work out, but we often feel that way about official drivers as well. So what makes these new drivers so special that they deserve a second mention? What exactly is the "Holy Grail" of this driver release?
Given this is a laptop article, you've probably already guessed, but the new drivers are available for notebooks as well. That's right, NVIDIA managed to release updated drivers for all major platforms on the same day! The drivers are available for all users whether they run the latest Windows 7 Release Candidate, Windows Vista, or Windows XP -- in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. If that's not enough, NVIDIA updated their drivers again one week later with the 185.85 WHQL release, once again available for all the major platforms and cards.
If you're running an older laptop, we do have to curb our enthusiasm. Users of GeForce Go 7 series hardware will have to continue using the last 179.48 beta drivers. Of course, it's also very unlikely that the latest drivers will contain any optimizations for older DirectX 9 hardware, so the 179.48 release should continue to work fine for the time being. (It's interesting to note that in quite a few titles we test with, performance has actually dropped somewhat over the past six months of mobile driver releases, so GeForce Go 7 users have even less incentive to want to upgrade.) Everyone else that runs a laptop with NVIDIA graphics will probably want to update... well, almost everyone.
As in the past, NVIDIA's mobile reference drivers only work with laptops from participating vendors. That covers the vast majority of users that have laptops, but some vendors/models are not supported:
- Hybrid SLI notebooks:
- Acer Aspire 7530
- BenQ Joybook S42
- Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Xi 3650
- MSI EX630
- Qosmio X305-Q706
- Qosmio X305-Q708
- Acer Aspire 7530
- Fujitsu notebooks -- (please contact the notebook OEM for driver support for these notebooks). Note: Fujitsu Siemens (FSC) notebooks are supported in this release
- Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks (please contact the notebook OEM for driver support for these notebooks)
- Sony VAIO notebooks (please contact the notebook OEM for driver support for these notebooks)
- Any notebook that is launched after the release date of this driver (Ed: naturally)
If you've been following NVIDIA's mobile driver releases, you may notice that Dell's Vostro line is no longer on the unsupported list -- most likely Dell heard your complaints. We're not sure why the Hybrid SLI notebooks aren't supported, but a far bigger concern is that several major vendors are apparently unwilling to participate in NVIDIA's mobile driver program. So let's make this clear: Lenovo, Sony, and Fujitsu, get with the program! Granted, none of those companies focuses on gaming laptops, but updated drivers are still important for other reasons -- for example, if you want to run the release candidate for Windows 7 with optimal performance. For reference, the latest driver currently available from Sony appears to be the 176 series, Lenovo offers the 178 series, and Fujitsu is still serving up 174 series drivers.
Is this going to be the way of all driver releases from the green team going forward? We certainly hope so, and if that's the case their competitors are in a difficult bind. It's absolutely great that notebook users won't have to wait several extra months before they get updated drivers for once. Put another way: NVIDIA has just moved all-in with pocket aces and there's another ace on the flop. ATI has their work cut out for them if they want to match that high standard, and that goes double for gaming laptops where driver updates are even more crucial. We can basically state that any game launched after a driver release is not likely to have any specific optimizations. Sometimes that will matter and other times it won't, but newer drivers are particularly helpful for multi-GPU configurations running new titles, which brings us back to the ASUS W90Vp.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
25 Comments
View All Comments
nubie - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Well. . .If there was a PCI-e standard for mobile, then maybe you could choose your graphics and the laptops would have to work properly with standard drivers?
What if you used DisplayPort for the interface to the display? Then you could plug in any graphics chip and it would work with the standard drivers.
You would of course need "thermal" stages, where you had a cap on the amount of power that it could dissipate, but if you wanted to set your PC on a fan and cut out a vent you could move up.
I think that a standard needs to be set already. There is no excuse for making a handful of extra or different pins, or form factors off by a few millimeters just so that you can't build your own system or upgrade it.
I would hope that as time progresses you could put a faster chip on a smaller more advanced process into an older laptop, or just choose the exact graphics you want (IE less powerful) in a system with the processing power you need.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Unfortunately, the biggest reason for a lack of unified mobile GPU standards is that OEMs along with ATI and NVIDIA like to compete in a variety of ways. Look at Apple and imagine trying to tell them they their laptops need to conform to a standard layout.It *could* happen, and for higher performance laptops with discrete GPUs like the W90Vp, that would be ideal. In fact, the GPU modules in the W90 look very similar to the GPU modules from NVIDIA. The problem is, no one wants to do the work to make sure upgraded GPUs would work -- plus you need to worry about having not just a standardized form factor, but standardized heatsinks/fans.
Ultimately, a standardized notebook form factor would probably lose more customers than it would gain. Everyone would complain about the "boring design and aesthetics", and the number of new bugs/problems we'd see would probably skyrocket. But hey, maybe someone will prove me wrong on this and make the idea work....
Goty - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Wait, NVIDIA managed to release drivers on all platforms simultaneously ONCE and suddenly they have a unified driver model? I'd have to wait and see if that trend continues down the road, but I'm not holding my breath.There's also the issue that a large number of notebooks simply won't accept the drivers directly from NVIDIA.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
NVIDIA previously had a mobile driver program where they committed to quarterly updates, and they delivered on that three times (though the first wasn't quite "quarterly"). The drivers started out several months behind the desktop releases, and now we have drivers released on all platforms twice (185.81 and then the final 185.85) - though granted they're mostly the same thing.As far as laptops where the NVIDIA drivers won't work, are they in the "unsupported" list? They've worked on every laptop I've tried, which ranged from 8600M to 9500M to 8800M SLI to 9800M. What laptops specifically don't work or have problems? Or are these problems caused by old and cluttered Windows installs where malware or something else gets in the way?
If NVIDIA doesn't continue to release unified drivers, we'll certainly point it out, but at the same time they've already strongly committed to minimum quarterly updates. That's more than anyone else has done for mobile graphics.
rbfowler9lfc - Friday, May 29, 2009 - link
Really impressive battery life. You can watch a 1080p movie on the road, as long as it doesn't last longer than 1h. Bah!