What I learnt about Nvidia Device Drivers
April 26th, 2006 // 4:04 pm @ Amar
Recently Nvidia updated their Forceware drivers with a new version, and I wanted to update the drivers for the Nvidia Geforce FX 6200 Go chipset on my laptop. Nvidia claims that their drivers supports a Unified architecture and it was strange that their latest Forceware drivers failed to update my laptop saying that it did not find any compatible hardware.
Thus I began to research on the topic to find why an Nvidia driver failed to detect the 6200 Go chip in my laptop. To sum up my findings in short, the Nvidia unified architecture is actually valid. It means, that for all Nvidia chipsets there is just one single device drivers. So the latest Forceware drivers are bound to support my Geforce 6200 Go chip. But the installer is configured not to install on any mobile version of the graphic cards, thus allowing the laptop maker to support the mobile driver and bring out a customised driver for their laptop. The downside is that I have to wait till my laptop manufacturer releases an updated driver.
However, there is a way to bypass the wait for a manufacturer and install the latest Nvidia drivers. You will loose out on any customisation ( if any ) by your laptop manufacturer. But you can get the latest updated device driver from Nvidia itself to run your graphics chip. The decision on which cards the driver installation will support, is in an INF file which contains definitions of all the different manufacturer customised chips. The downloadable drivers from Nvidia do not contain these definitions. All you have to do is find your laptop manufacturer codes and put it in that file by hacking the installer. And you are all set.
Seems to complicated and too much of a hassle? No worries… Just head over to http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ who release a modded version of the driver as soon as Nvidia releases a new version. This site has definitely been a great help in getting Oblivion up and running on my laptop and getting my system to support the latest Nvidia driver.
Category : General