NVIDIA New Reference Driver 12.xx More Power For Pentium 4?

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NVIDIA's 'Leakage Policy', Continued

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Tony Tamasi, NVIDIA's Director of Product Management:Leaked drivers continue to be a major problem for us, and cause for a great deal of pain for everyone involved. We really do not want the drivers to leak, and we continue to try and prevent that from happening. We've gone as far as turning off a huge number of customer accesses to our prerelease drivers, as well as virtually eliminating all developers from access to prerelease drivers - but the leaks persist.Part of this problem is that our business model requires us to enable our manufacturing partners and OEM's continuous access to our updated drivers in order for them to progress with bug closure and GPU/system qualification and WHQL certification. Because we are not vertically integrated, that means that top tier OEM's, the contract equipment manufacturers that build products for those OEM's, and key AIC manufacturers all need early access to prerelease drivers. Typically these drivers are known to be "buggy" in general, but get built to address a specific bug or bugs that a customer reported, and help to keep the QA pipeline flowing (typically QA cycles at OEM's can take as long as 3 months). As we progress, the driver continues to improve in quality, eventually to the point where we have a single driver binary that can pass WHQL for all our OEM customers across our product line. We do our best to only post drivers that meet a high level of quality - at a minimum WHQL certification for our product line. The updated drivers we post will meet that mark.The current drivers posted on our web site (built from the rel6 tree) have been posted for about 4 months, so you're right - we're definitely due for a new release. The new drivers (12.xx) are based on an updated code tree and class interface (they support the NV20 architecture of course), but along the way we also changed versioning schemes. The "single-digit" prefix driver base (6.xx, 7.xx) are based on the NV10 class [GeForce2 type chips - comment of the editor ] architecture, and the two-digit prefix drivers signify the transition to the new class architecture to support NV20 [GeForce3 type chips - comment of the editor ]. We went to more digits primarily to provide more flexibility for versioning for specific customer issues.
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