There hasn’t been any new Nvidia video card drivers since last December until today. Today there has been a new WHQL stable release of the video card drivers, version 175.16. You can get them here.
I have an 8600 GT from eVGA, obviously nothing special but it is the first Nvidia card I have ever used and I’ve never been happier. Nvidia is fast, stable, widely supported, and is more involved with graphics and developers. The only thing that’s missing is open source drivers. Ati recently made their Linux drivers open source, which was an unexpected move coming from Ati, who were notoriously known for their weak proprietary Linux drivers. Nvidia on the other hand was always known for the better Linux drivers, though still proprietary, with more support and involvement. There are rumors that Nvidia will follow suit but that is yet to happen. We could only hope for the best. Below are the Release Highlights:
- WHQL Certified for Windows XP
- Supports GeForce FX, 6, 7, 8, and 9 series GPUs including these newly released GPUs:
- GeForce 9800 GX2
- GeForce 9800 GTX
- GeForce 9600 GT
- GeForce 9600 GSO
- GeForce 8300
- GeForce 8200/ nForce 730a
- GeForce 8100/NVIDIA nForce 720a
- Supports single GPU and NVIDIA SLI™ technology* on DirectX 9 and OpenGL.
- Adds new PureVideo HD features for GeForce 9800 GX2, 9800 GTX, 9600 GT and 9600 GSO:
- Dynamic Contrast Enhancement
- Dynamic Blue, Green & Skin Tone Enhancements
- Dual-Stream Decode Acceleration**
- Improved performance on many DirectX 9 and OpenGL applications.
- Numerous game and application compatibility fixes. Please read the release notes for more information on product support, features, driver fixes and known compatibility issues.
- Users without US English operating systems can select their language and download the International driver here.
- GPU overclocking and temperature monitoring is available by installing NVIDIA System Tools software.
Remember to first uninstall any previous versions of your video card drivers before installing these new ones to avoid conflicts or other problems.
I opened up my Razer DiamondBack Plasma Limited Edition (Which I’ve had since I was a freshmen in High School). I used many guides including one at I-Hacked.com, Razer Blueprints, as well as one from Dans Data. These helped with opening up the Razer which was pretty simple, except for the part where I had to detach the front side of the mouse. Anyways, after opening it I removed a lot of like, wool or some type of crazy stuff haha, well not a lot but there was a considerable amount accumulated on the scroll wheel which I hoped was the reason for the jerky scrolling.
Oh by the way, what I mean by jerky scrolling is, I would scroll down a page and every 3 scrolls or so it would jerk and scroll in the opposite direction. This is obviously very frickin annoying especially in games like Unreal Tournament 3. I usually use hotkeys to switch weapons in games but in UT3 there are too many weapons and in the middle of the intense adrenaline packed action it’s not sane to reach across the keyboard for the 9 key. There is a method called Pipe Switching which allows one to make it so that, well for example picture it this way. I press the 1 key once and the link gun comes up, I press it again and the rocket launcher comes up. This means that 6 weapons could be put into 3 keys. I haven’t tried this yet and there are some claims that there is a momentary lag when the keys are press which is obviously a huge downfall.
Anyways the jerky scrolling problem is the worst when scrolling through weapons as you might imagine because you would never be able to get to the weapon you want to use. I figured it had to be some type of junk building up around the scroll wheel inside the mouse so I decided to open it up. Like I already mentioned, there was some build up of like, well just dust and the like which I carefully took my time to remove. Anyways I decided to clean things the best I could but don’t see any huge difference, except that now (And I think this is FireFox’ doing since I just turned on ’smooth scrolling’) instead of a huge jerk in the opposite scrolling direction, it just doesn’t scroll for that scroll. Like I said I haven’t tested this extensively yet but from the looks of it the cleaning didn’t have any profound effect.
The problem could be with the scroll wheel checker thing that checks the scrolls and all that, it might have a tiny bit of dust in there that’s causing this or it could be that it’s just too old, after all like I said I’ve been with this mouse for like 4 years now haha, but I still love it.
In case you haven’t heard, AMD has been progressing ATI card’s Open Source movement, read it here. This is huge news, I used to have an ATI 9800 PRO and the drivers seemed to work fine for me but I was annoyed at the amount of people that bashed ATI for having, supposedly, bad drivers on Linux. The drivers seemed to work for me, but they did fail at working seamlessly with things like Beryl/Compiz, and I would also eventually run into problems with the card. Despite this it always annoyed me how people continually bashed ATI for it. Continue Reading
Hey guys, I haven’t posted here in the longest time it’s kind of weird. Continue Reading
