Nvidia Hosts Mobile Drivers Directly

By Aaron Heibert
published

We all know the procedure, right? You need to update your mobile graphics driver, but when you get to the downloads section of the notebook manufacturers site, the driver is 3, 4, 5 or more revisions behind.

NVIDIA apparently heard the cries of many laptop users and are making some changes in your favor. You can now download beta ForceWare drivers for mobile GeForce 8M, 9M and Quadro NVS mobile graphics processors directly from its website. Essentially, NVIDIA will now continue to offer ForceWare for mobile platforms so that you do not have to wait on the system manufacturers.

Currently, NVIDIA has ForceWare 179.28 for the above mentioned GPUs for Windows Vista x86, Windows Vista x64, Windows XP x86 and Windows XP x64--which essentially covers everyone. However, NVIDIA warns that the drivers will not work with the Dell Vostro series, Lenovo Thinkpads, Sony VAIO, and notebooks that use Hybrid SLI technology. The completed, non-beta, set of drivers should be available in early 2009.

The current beta 179.28 drivers offers support for CUDA technology and PhysX hardware acceleration, just like the desktop counterparts.

For the record, AMD has provided mobile driver solutions for some time now, although it too, have its share of unsupported models from various manufactures, Dell included.

Links to ForceWare 179.28 BETA drivers per platform:

Microsoft Windows Vista x86 (opens in new tab)

Microsoft Windows Vista x64 (opens in new tab)

Microsoft Windows XP x86 (opens in new tab)

Microsoft Windows XP x64 (opens in new tab)

6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • velocityg4
    From what I have seen many manufacturers do not even bother posting any updated drivers for any of a laptops hardware. I resorted to finding as many drivers from actual chip manufacturers as possible rather than the computer assembler. The laptop was bought in 2005 all the drivers on the manufacturers web page are dated 2005.
    Reply
  • Pei-chen
    IBM / Lenovo is the only manufacture (don't know about Japanese manufactures) that will keep supplying drivers for notebook years down the road. I can still find updated driver for an 8 year old T21.
    Reply
  • JonnyDough
    This blog post is riddled with errors. Just thought I'd mention it.
    Reply
  • apoq
    'bout time
    Reply
  • apache_lives
    ummmmmmmmmm you can actually force standard desktop drivers on mobile gpus most of the time anyhow and get away with it that way - works 99% of the time (even if you select something very similar etc) - been doing it for years.
    Reply
  • As the above poster said, you can go to http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ download a nearly latest (if not latest) version of nvidia/ati drivers and use the modified INF (provided) to allow the install on your laptop.
    Reply