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When will Nvidia release their 3D Vision Surround for the GeForce GTX 400 series of graphics cards? According to a post on the Nvidia nTersect blog, they are planning to release the new drivers at the end of June. At that point in time, will provide a list of games that support it, as well as guidance on how to get the best results using 3D Vision Surround. Personally, I am very curious to see how it will turn out. I can think of several things that might ruin the experience (much like the bezels do with ATI’s Eyefinity6). But I remain hopeful.
The fact is we are not ready yet – the surround driver needs some final improvements. When we first showed this technology live at CES in January, we expected this to become available with the first release of our 256 branch driver which was then targeted for April. Our new target for 3D Vision Surround is the end of June in a follow-on release of this 256 driver branch. Our first 256 based driver is planned to post to nvidia.com on May 24th and will enable new SLI setup controls and improve performance on several key applications for GTX 400 GPUs.
via : 3D Vision Surround Driver Launch Timeline
Hardware drivers, nvidia
Several sites have been reporting on the new NVidia plan to unify the Desktop and Notebook drivers into a single “unified” architecture. Their various desktop systems have been unified for quite some time, but laptop owners have long been at the mercy of the OEM providers to release updates which were frequently outdated and buggy. Embracing the laptop-buzz generated by Optimus and the new mobile chips, NVidia is seizing the opportunity to begin releasing a single driver for all platforms.
This is particularly important as of late, because the GPU is being used for more than just gaming. Owners of notebooks with discrete NVIDIA GPUs that wanted to take advantage of the increasing number of CUDA-enabled applications, for example, can’t do so if their notebook drivers didn’t enable CUDA.
via NVIDIA To Unify Desktop and Notebook Drivers – HotHardware.
Hardware drivers, nvidia, optimus
Nvidia released new drivers for notebooks to PCs yesterday. These drivers add support for conencting 3-D displays to your notebook. This assumes, of course, that you have a Nvidia graphics chip in your notebook that is powerful enough to drive a 3-D display, and that you have a such a display.
With a compatible NVIDIA-powered notebook, you can use a 3D projector, DLP HDTV or 120Hz LCD to play over 425 PC games or view movies and digital photographcs in full stereoscopic 3D. You can even connect a full HD 1080p Alienware or ACER LCD display to your notebook for the highest quality stereoscopic experience. This driver kit will also work with the ASUS G51J 3D laptop which has a built-in 3D Vision LCD display.
via nTersect Blog – New Verde Drivers Bring 3D Vision Support to Notebook PCs.
Hardware 3-D, drivers, nvidia
AMD is reclaiming a bit of the OpenGL crowd with their latest beta drivers that bring OpenGL3.3 and OpenGL4.0 support to their newer hardware. If you have a Radeon HD5400, HD5500, HD5600, or HD5700 then you can load up the new driver and begin playing with everything OpenGL4.0 has to offer (except double-precision support, which is coming later).
The fact that we are able to announce our support for OpenGL 3.3 and OpenGL 4.0 at launch is an incredible feat on the part of our OpenGL software team, and speaks volumes to the commitment and continued support that the entire team brings to the many developers utilizing OpenGL. In fact, with the launch of these updates, industry pundits have commented that OpenGL is in for a renaissance of sorts. As a company that believes in and encourages open and industry standards, maintaining OpenGL as a strong and viable graphics API is important to AMD.
via Ready, Willing and Able – AMD Supports OpenGL 3.3 and OpenGL 4.0 | AMD Developer Central Blogs.
Hardware amd, ati, drivers, opengl
AMD has just released the Catalyst 10.3a preview drivers. These drivers offer improved support for Eyefinity by including bezel correction. In addition, these drivers also offer improvement in games by about 5%, depending upon the game. Some games will see a larger improvement (DiRT 2 improves up to 30% on ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products), while others will see less.
The Catalyst 10.3a preview drivers are not WHQL drivers. The Catalyst 10.3 WHQL drivers will not contain Eyefinty6 updates and an optimization for Alien vs. Predator. The Catalyst 10.3a preview drivers will have this extra feature.
Now, NVidia is set to release the GeForce GTX 480 next week, which is rumored to be about 5% faster than AMD’s card. In other words, AMD has released this driver in order to improve the performance of their product which will (hopefully) spoil some of their rivals thunder. These next couple of weeks are going to be interesting.
Update from CatalystMaker: The download links are wrong – the page went up about one hour too early.
Update from CatalystMaker: The download links are fixed.
You can download the new drivers from the AMD Underground.
ATI Catalyst Control Center – ATI Eyefinity technology enhancements
- Display Bezel Compensation
- Easy-to-use wizard shows users how to adjust their display layout to remove the pixels occupied by their display bezels
- Per-Display Color Adjust
- Individual Color, Brightness and Contrast controls
- Multiple ATI Eyefinity Groups
- Create more than one ATI Eyefinity group from multiple displays
- Improved Display Configuration switching
- Support for ATI Eyefinity groups and the ATI Catalyst™ Control Center profile manager
- Easy to toggle between cloned and extended desktop modes
ATI Catalyst™ support for 3D Stereoscopic glasses
- AMD has updated it’s Direct3D (Quad buffer support) driver to enable 3rd party middleware vendors such as iZ3D to output stereo L/R images at 120 Hz (60 Hz per eye)
via : ATI Catalyst 10.3 Preview Update Driver Coming Out Tomorrow
via : CatalystMaker
Hardware amd, ati, drivers
NVidia’s Brian Burke brings us news of a new NVidia Driver that’s out, and while not WHQL certified this time, it does resolve the previous Fan issue found in 196.75 (supposedly, we haven’t tested it ourselves yet). From their own release notes:
This is a WHQL-candidate driver for GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200, and 300-series desktop GPUs and ION desktop GPUs.
This driver resolves fan speed issues reported with version 196.75 drivers. NVIDIA asks that you remove 196.75 drivers and update to either 196.21 WHQL drivers or to this 197.13 WHQL-candidate driver.
If you currently have 196.75 installed, please first uninstall it before installing 197.13.
You can hit their website and download it now for:
I don’t see anything online yet about Linux drivers.
Hardware drivers, nvidia
Recently we told you about NVidia pulling their drivers due to overheating issues. By overheating issues, NVidia means that the drivers caused the fan on NVidia graphics cards to stop working. Today the word is out that NVidia is pulling some Unix drivers as well for the same issue. From the DarkVision Hardware site:
The company says the 195.36.03 and 195.36.08 *nix drivers are affected by the issue and urges users to downgrade to driver version 190.53 or 195.30 public beta.
I just checked the NVidia driver site, and 190.53 which was release on December 16, 2009 is the most recent stable driver available for Linux 32-bit and 64-bit systems, with 195.30 being beta. My drivers are way out-of-date since they are 185.18.36 from August 2009.
via NVIDIA pulls *nix drivers as well.
Hardware drivers, nvidia
Anandtech has posted an article on the new Catalyst 10.2 drivers from ATI. Many of the features in this release are already available in previous hotfixes. In addition to talking about the 10.2 version, they also give a preview of next month’s 10.3 version. Personally, I am still waiting for Eyefinity6 hardware.
Catalyst 10.2
- Crossfire profile
- CrossfireX rearchitecture
- Ultra Low Power State
- Crossfire Eyefinity
- DisplayPort Audio
Catalyst 10.3
- Catalyst Mobility
- Eyefinity Bezel Correction
- Eyefinity Per Display Controls
- Eyefinity Multiple Groups
- Eyefinity Display Configuration Switching
- 3D Stereo driver hooks
via AnandTech: What’s New: AMD’s Catalyst 10.2 & 10.3 Drivers.
Hardware ati, drivers, graphics card
Mere hours after news broke of NVidia possibly “fudging” the benchmark results of the recent mobile GPU benchmark, a rebuttal has appeared that places the blame not on NVidia, but on ASUS.
Who is at fault here? The answer is not simple, but understandable: ASUS. When we checked for latest drivers, it turned out that AMD’s own site will give you ATI Mobility Radeon X1800 as the latest mobile graphics card out there. No Mobility Radeons 2000, 3000 or 4000 series exist. According to amd.com, ATI stopped making graphics cards for notebooks in 2006. We asked questions to Ian McNaughton and Jay Marsden of AMD fame, but received no answer at press time. We reserve the right to update this article with their answer once it becomes available.
While NVidia could possibly be blamed for not advertising the lack of game profile or in not really pushing the ASUS system to it’s maximum limits, that’s not really their job. The real puzzler is how did ASUS create a “Gaming laptop” with chips that, supposedly, were not manufactured after 2006?
via nVidia responds to benchmark claims and How ASUS notebook SNAFU caused a war of words between AMD and nVidia – Bright Side Of News*.
Hardware amd, asus, benchmark, drivers, nvidia
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