Digital Home Thoughts: NVIDIA Now Providing Notebook Graphics Drivers On NVIDIA.COM

"Users with notebooks equipped with NVIDIA® graphics processing units (GPUs) now have the added flexibility of downloading upgradeable graphics drivers directly from NVIDIA.com so they can immediately take advantage of new features, improved application compatibility, and performance optimizations. The first graphics driver release from NVIDIA will extend the NVIDIA CUDATM architecture to notebook GPUs, enabling the growing number of consumers moving to a notebook-only lifestyle to immediately experience the wide range of CUDA-based applications-from heart-stopping GPU-accelerated game physics to GPU-accelerated video conversion."

Three words: about freaking time! It's always driven me nuts when I buy a notebook and the lazy OEM never bothers to give me updated video drivers - that's exactly what happened when I bought a 17" Fujitsu notebook a few years back. It was the closest thing to a gaming laptop they made, and they never updated the graphics drivers. But that's all over not!

Oh, wait, it's not quite freakin' time yet - I just tried to download updated drivers for my XPS M1330, and got the same 176.44 drivers that I currently have, along with a message saying that I have to get drivers from Dell. I poked around a bit more, and found some beta drivrers - it turns out that they won't have WHQL-certified drivers available until early next year. Gee, thanks Nvidia. This is why PR gets a bad name sometimes - they omit part of the truth, making the headline deceptive. I'm not keen on trying beta drivers on my laptop - I value stability too much for that - but if you're up for some beta driver action, you can download the 179.28 beta drivers now for your 8000M and 9000M series notebook GPUs.