Offical - When will we get new drivers - thread

[Bratag]

Coming up on 2 months and , no offense to the nvidia team, this latest release needs replacing badly. HUGE memory issues within the driver make it nigh on unsuable for many apps.

So - when can we expect new ones

[mtrax]

hmm perhaps is not quiet as bad as that IMO, but I am waiting for some HD fixes..

[Thunderbird]

New drivers will appear when they are done. Only nvidia knows when that will be.

[smokalot]

Originally Posted by Thunderbird

New drivers will appear when they are done. Only nvidia knows when that will be.

yeah, that's the point of this topic I guess, to ask nvidia to share their information with us.

They sure know wheter it's going to be months or days, and they have no reason not to tell us.

[EasyPrey]

In nVidia's defense. It is really hard to predict those kinds of things. Especially when you are dealing with device drivers.

1) Sometimes a trivial fix requires to do full Q/A. Fixing one bug may uncover deeper problems. What you thought was a "couple of hour fix". Might require you a month of re-write.

2) If you announce a date and miss it, people will be upset at you. Better to have a policy of "it will be released when ready". Rather than have a sword hanging over your head.

3) My "understanding" is that hardware H.264 decoding (for 7800 GT) is supposed to be included in this release. That is a big can of worms (in terms of Q/A).

4) There is nothing worse than a rushed release that is a regression in terms of stability and/or performance.

Therefore, don't expect formal announcements. However, sometimes beta versions are out a little early. That is about as official as you are going to get.

-EasyPrey

[kenyee]

Being in software development, I understand the fuzziness in actual release dates, but you always have target dates.

Some comment along the lines of this would be fine:
"we're targetting March 9th for the release date, but the schedule may slip because of bugs found during QA, so don't bet your life on it or complain to us that we missed it because we're trying as hard as we can" I'm sure we'll all smack down the complainers in the forums ;-)

I'm looking for XvMC support for 6100/6150 chips in the next version since this is really broken and affects HD playback CPU usage. If the H.264 encoding makes it in, that's great, but I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't because of the complexity of it (ATI took a while to "release" it after "showing" it on their cards)...

[energyman76b]

Hi,

some news would be fine. It doesn't have to be specific. But I do also understand, that the nvidia devs prefer to spend their time with bug fixes, coding and helping users in the forum instead of making a blog about ongoing work.
Especially, if it always the same 'RHEL X, SLES Y bug with application W, have spend hours on it and not found it...'

@Bratag

which applications do not work?
I am using ut2004 which is working fine and vegastrike, which suffers from a FSAA bug in the drivers - but it is perfectly usable without FSAA

[directedition]

In regards to hardware decoding of various codecs, do you think they'll provide code to make mplayer or xine make use of this feature?

Also, it would be nice to have some sort of estimate as to when the next driver release is out. My laptop with a Go 7800 arrives in two weeks and I would really like 3D driver support for it by then.

[netllama]

The next driver release will not be in the next 2 weeks.

-Lonni

[SinoTech]

Originally Posted by netllama

The next driver release will not be in the next 2 weeks.

-Lonni

Well, thanks for the answer. Anyway, can we expect support for the GeForce 7300 in the new driver? We've got currently two problems with it ...
1. For Linux there's currently no support for that card
2. Even under windows we haven't found a driver on the nvidia page, and the one coming with the card makes it badly slow (Using 3D Mark 2003 we've get arround 3000 points with the new GeForce 7300, but getting arround 4000 points with the old geforce 6200. I can't imgaing the new card is that much slower than the old card, and so I suppose it's a driver problem).
It would be nice to see a stable and fast driver for that card (for windows and linux) or at least to know when we can expect it.
Regards,

Sino

[Thunderbird]

I'm not sure if the 7300 has to outperform a 6200. Basicly the gpu is the same as the geforce7 is allmost the same as a geforce6. Further the 6200 has the same amount of vertex and pixel pipelines and it uses turbocache to address system memory. (the 6200TC used it too)

A 128bit 6200 card was 'fast' but most cards used 64bit memory and those were a lot slower and second the 6200TC cards were even slower (those can even use a 32bit bus). The 7300 should to be seen as a successor the 6200TC and depending on the clockspeeds and the size of the memory bus it can be slower or equal to the 6200.

[SinoTech]

Originally Posted by Thunderbird

I'm not sure if the 7300 has to outperform a 6200. Basicly the gpu is the same as the geforce7 is allmost the same as a geforce6. Further the 6200 has the same amount of vertex and pixel pipelines and it uses turbocache to address system memory. (the 6200TC used it too)

A 128bit 6200 card was 'fast' but most cards used 64bit memory and those were a lot slower and second the 6200TC cards were even slower (those can even use a 32bit bus). The 7300 should to be seen as a successor the 6200TC and depending on the clockspeeds and the size of the memory bus it can be slower or equal to the 6200.

Thanks for your fast answer. Anyway if the 7300 is the successor of the 6200, in my opinion it should be at least fast as the 6200. Ok, my 6200 works with 128 bit, while the 7300 of my friend only works with 64 bit. But why we put DDR2 ram on the 7300 and a faster frequency if it useless in the end?
Why should someone buy a 7300 if he can get a faster card for approximately the same prize?
All that seems a little bit useless in my eyes.
Regards,

Sino