NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX GPU Review

Detonator Release 75 Driver

I’ve mentioned it in passing on the previous pages, but now we are going to look at what exactly has changed on the new Release 75 driver that is already available on the NVIDIA website.  With every new GPU release there is of course a new driver required to take advantage of it, but NVIDIA also used this opportunity to improve on some other driver features as well. 

For gamers, NVIDIA’s core audience with the 7800 GTX product, you will find the most enhancements in the 75.xx drivers.  First, there have been a couple dozen or so additions to the SLI profile list, expanding the game count to over 80 that the NVIDIA driver supports out of the box.  In addition, NVIDIA has addressed a long standing issue of giving the users the ability to enable SLI in applications for which there is no profile.  In response to ATI’s CrossFire claims of being able to support EVERY game available, NVIDIA will now allow the user to global select whether SLI is enabled or disabled in games. 

You can see that the user has the option of single GPU rendering which will effectively disable SLI, or choosing one of the two rendering methods that NVIDIA supports. 

Also in regards to SLI and profiles, the NVIDIA driver installer will now help you better manage your profiles by allowing you to update or keep your existing profiles, so that you no longer have to readjust any profiles you may have edited beforehand. 

NVIDIA also claims increased performance for those users that have TurboCache enabled GPUs as well as 64-bit OS support that is within 2% of the 32-bit OS performance. 

Video users have a few new features as well including improved HDTV support, a new de-interlacing algorithm for high definition 1080i, 2:2 inverse pull-down support and new Windows MCE extensions. 

Professional users will find enhancements for remote desktop support that will apparently help with users of multi-display desktops in both Windows and Linux.  A new SmartDimmer feature for mobile GPUs should improve battery life on notebooks as well. 

NVIDIA also previewed a few new things coming to the Release 80 driver in a few months.  These include more freedoms in the SLI front such as the ability to use cards from different board vendors in SLI mode as well as using different BIOS revisions.  You will be able to enable and disable SLI without having to reboot your machine and NVIDIA also says that you will have ‘more freedom hooking up displays to boards,’ whatever that means.  Perhaps dual display with SLI enabled is coming?

Also NVIDIA mentioned that dual core processor support should be here by then giving users with multiple processors or multiple core processors a slight performance advantage by adding more than a single thread to the driver core. 

It looks like good things are coming to NVIDIA users very soon.