News - NVIDIA releases Windows 7 drivers

[HEXUS]

First of a new series of regular driver updates from NVIDIA for the new Microsoft operating system.

Read more.

[scaryjim]

Great, *another* set of drivers / patches / updates to download

[TheAnimus]

are they trying to avoid been named and shamed as responsible for the large number of BSODs?

[Funkstar]

Is the Win7 driver model significantly different from Vista?

I thought it was a case of: XP -> Vista big change, Vista -> Win7, not so much.

[The Jambo]

are they trying to avoid been named and shamed as responsible for the large number of BSODs?

Did you expect to try a Beta version of an operating system and expect everything to be perfect?

[Funkstar]

I think TheAnimus was refering to the Nvidia on Vista issues people had for the first 6 months of the OS.

[lodore]

windows update in windows 7 already provides the wddm 1.1 driver.
it had its second update via windows update a few days ago.
but now the lastest betas are provided by the nvidia website.


btw these are the changes in wddm 1.1

1.1
Windows 7 will feature WDDM v1.1; the details of this new version were unveiled at WinHEC 2008. New features include [3]:

Return of 2D GUI hardware acceleration for use by GDI and Direct2D
BitBlt, StretchBlt, TransparentBlt
AlphaBlend, ColorFill
ClearType font support
DXVA-HD DDI
Hardware video overlay DDI
Optional AES 128 encryption
Optional decoding of encrypted video content

[crowdsurfer100]

Is the Win7 driver model significantly different from Vista?

I thought it was a case of: XP -> Vista big change, Vista -> Win7, not so much.

Just because Vista and Windows 7 look similar in terms of appearance, it doesn't mean that the drivers are going to be the same.

[Funkstar]

Just because Vista and Windows 7 look similar in terms of appearance, it doesn't mean that the drivers are going to be the same.

No, I understand that. But the whole thing about the move from Vista to Win7 is that it is an evolutionary step rather than revolutionary. So although it is inevitable there will be changes, there shouldn't be as many or as large as they were when going from XP to Vista.

As lodore said in his post, WDDM has moved from 1.0 to 1.1 in Win7, as opposed to launching an entirely new driver model that was WDDM 1.0 with Vista.

This is a classic Tick-Tock development cycle.