Nvidia to Provide Notebook Driver Updates Itself

Nvidia to Provide Notebook Driver Updates Itself


Nvidia said Thursday that it will begin providing driver updates for its notebook graphics chips directly on its Web site, bypassing the need to visit the sites owned by the notebook vendors themselves. The first release will add Nvidia's CUDA functionality to notebooks equipped with GeForce 8 and 9-series GPUs or Quadro NVS-equipped notebooks, Nvidia said. Nvidia will add a WHQL-certified version supporting all GeForce 7, 8, and 9 series and Quadro NVS series notebook GPUs early next year.


Nvidia's choice has become standard practice within the desktop PC community; users typically have the option of downloading a standard driver set from either Nvidia or sometimes the graphics-card or board maker itself. Notebook vendors typically use some form of proprietary software service to facilitate upgrades, however.


"Nvidia is committed to giving the rapidly growing number of customers using notebook GPUs the same performance optimizations and innovative graphics features that desktop customers have grown accustomed to," said Dwight Diercks, vice president of software engineering at Nvidia, in a statement. "To accomplish this, we have worked diligently over the past year to modularize our driver architecture and develop a unified driver install package that will not only work with notebooks from all manufacturers but also maintain all of their specific model customizations such as hotkeys and suspend and resume functionality.


" In other Nvidia news, the company announced its Ion platform on Wednesday. Essentially, Ion is simply Nvidia's pitch to get its GeForce 9400 GPU, announced in conjunction with the latest MacBook notebooks, tied to Intel's Atom processor.


If anything, this is savvy PR on Nvidia's part: get the press talking about what essentially is a sales pitch. Intel can bundle a processor, chipset and wireless radio together and call it "Centrino"; what bundling options does Nvidia have? Discounts for desktop GPUs? I can't see the company having much leverage here, at least initially. In all fairness, however, any netbook can use improved graphics, especially to assist playback of Flash video and other multimedia functions.