PCA Forums

Wow, this snuck in without being noticed! New OFFICIAL NVidia v6.50 reference drivers for Win2K & Win9x have been posted on NVidia's web site: http://www.nvidia.com/products.nsf/html ... ator3.html

WOOHOO!!!!

Thes babies have been a long time coming.

Thanks for the heads up on that one FP on my way now

I take everyone's advice and just use reference drivers. So it's about time I have something new to try out. Thanks for post FP. I haven't been to NVidias site in a long while.

From everything else I have read on other sites, the 6.50 official drivers are the same as the 6.50 Betas that everyone else is using. If you are using the 6.50 beta drivers dated 12-4-2001, then these official 6.50 drivers are identical.

Makes me wonder if both the Beta and Official versions are the same why Nvidia did not release them as offical drivers when the 6.50 Betas came out months ago. . .

They probably wanted to test that they were really ok before releasing them offically.

Darkheart

I'm not sure I'd trust them to be the same drivers. Leaked drivers are usually released by NVidia engineers without company approval. ANYTHING could be in them.

Bad news is the NVidia server's being worked over like a stripper at a bachelor party. Forget the HTTP download, it'll stall halfway through. FTP's more reliable, but it'll be slow with everyone downloading.

If I can get these bloody drivers downloaded, I'll post them on my site.

I agree with you there, FP.

I checked to see if I had the 6.50 Beta (dated 12-4-2000), and I did. But I went ahead and D/L the official drivers and replaced the "so-called" Beta drivers.

Nothing wrong with playing it safe. . . .

Well there is one difference I know of with the official 6.50 vs the leaked one. With the leaked 6.50's, the overclocking slider did not work. It does with the official.

Does anyone know what exactly, if anything is noticeably better about the new drivers vs the 6.31s?

6.50's are a bit faster and more stable. Also is a little known addition of being able to add the S3TC feature in the registry in the opengl section of the Nvidia drivers. This forces all opengl DXTC1 texture compression calls to use DXTC3 instead which helps fix the ugly skies. Actually this feature was added in, I believe, in driver versions 6.43 and up.

thanks. I'll need to test these drivers out today.

One other thing. On Nvidia's site, there are two sets of drivers for Windows 9X. One is, "W9X-6.50.zip" and the other is "TNTW9XE.exe". I downloaded both set and they are exactly the same drivers. The only difference is one is a zip and one is an exe. Dunno why Nvidia chose to label them the way they did. It's misleading because it suggests that one is for TNT only. Not true. Even a few websites are saying that.

But Nvidia has unified driver architechure, right? So if it works for TNT, then it should work for Geforces...

at least the new ones

Yup, one driver works on all NVidia cards EXCEPT The Riva 128 which was a different beast.