Voila! The first unified driver for motherboards - as long as they are nForce mobos

It's an incredibly gutsy move by Nvidia. The nForce chipset represents the idealism of media processing that was the original remit of the NV1, and something that everyone from Philips and NEC to ATI-acquired Chromatics has tried to tap into. One media processor handling video, 2D, 3D, and communications, driving overall system costs down. nForce isn't strictly a media processor, but it defines a media processing platform where NVIDIA holds all the cards. Intel could have done the same thing itself, but it has always chosen to emphasize the CPU, for obvious lucrative reasons, while NVIDIA has turned the PC into its own console, with the graphics and audio ruling the roost.

It's a gutsy move, like we said, but nForce has a way to go to prove itself. First shipments of the chips should be reaching the mobo vendors and PC OEMs by July or August, and the first nForce mobos, and possibly top tier OEM PCs, should hit the shelves in the Fall.

Follow-up by reading Computex: NVIDIA nForces Success In New Market .