Good news for people with nVidia graphics cards – today, the manufacturer released its 191.07 graphics drivers for all desktop graphics cards. As with the last few releases, these drivers fully support both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7.
These drivers support the usual goodies for users of cards in the GeForce 8 series or above – namely, PhysX, CUDA, WDDM 1.1, and DirectCompute, a series of technologies geared toward making your graphics card do more than play the latest games.
So what? It’s just another driver release, right? Well, that in itself is remarkable, and it shows just how far ahead Windows 7 is of Windows Vista.
Windows 7’s launch is imminent (16 days an 5 hours, says our countdown clock!), but it hasn’t happened yet. Only certain business and MSDN customers have (legally) gotten their hands on finished Windows 7 code. And yet, already we’ve seen multiple Windows 7 driver releases from many manufacturers.
Dell has Windows 7 drivers available for most of their current desktop and laptop models. ATI has officially supported Windows 7 since the Catalyst 9.3 driver package was released about seven months ago, and nVidia has had Windows 7 drivers available for almost as long. Intel has released a couple of sets of beta drivers, even keeping its old, low-end GMA 950 chipset up-to-date with new drivers.
This is a far cry from Windows Vista’s driver support – some studies have said that nVidia drivers were responsible for nearly 30% of Windows Vista’s crashes the year that operating system was released. Think about that! Every four times a Windows Vista computer crashed, it was the fault of nVidia drivers. Of course, most consumers didn’t know that – for them, an operating system crash was the operating system’s fault, and Microsoft’s and Vista’s reputation suffered as a result.
The rock-solid driver support that Windows 7 is going to enjoy when it launches in two weeks is tremendous, both for users and for Microsoft. Users get a more reliable and feature-rich computer, and Microsoft’s operating system can be judged based on its own successes and failures, not the failures of another company. That’s good news for everyone.
You can download the latest nVidia drivers for your graphics card from the nVidia Web site.
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