Community Led Driver Recommendations-GeForce Go 7xxx Series

[®®®]

NVIDIA GeForce Go 7xxx Series Driver Recommendation.

• GPUs:
  
• G70_DEV_0098=GeForce Go 7800
  
• G70_DEV_0099=GeForce Go 7800 GTX
  
• G71_DEV_0297=GeForce Go 7950 GTX
  
• G71_DEV_0298=GeForce Go 7900 GS
  
• G71_DEV_0299=Quadro NVS 510M / GeForce Go 7900 GTX
  
• G71_DEV_029A=Quadro FX 2500M
  
• G71_DEV_029B=Quadro FX 1500M
  
• G71_DEV_029D=Quadro FX 3500M
  
• G72_DEV_01D4=GeForce Go 7350
  
• G72_DEV_01D6=GeForce Go 7200
  
• G72_DEV_01D7=GeForce Go 7300 / Quadro NVS 110M
  
• G72_DEV_01D8=GeForce Go 7400 / Quadro NVS 120M
  
• G72_DEV_01D9=GeForce Go 7400 GS / 7450
  
• G72_DEV_01DA=Quadro NVS 110M
  
• G72_DEV_01DB=Quadro NVS 120M
  
• G72_DEV_01DC=Quadro FX 350M
  
• G73_DEV_0397=GeForce Go 7700
  
• G73_DEV_0398=GeForce Go 7600
  
• G73_DEV_0399=GeForce Go 7600 GT
  
• G73_DEV_039A=Quadro NVS 300M
  
• G73_DEV_039B=GeForce Go 7900 SE
  
• G73_DEV_039C=Quadro FX 550M
  
• C67_DEV_0530=GeForce 7190M / nForce 650M
  
• C67_DEV_0531=GeForce 7150M / nForce 630M
  
• C67_DEV_0533=GeForce 7000M / nForce 610M
  
  

UPDATES

2007-09-16: updated GPU list

2007-08-11_later: added a multiple choice poll, so if you want to recommend 2 or 3 drivers you can. Let us know through a post (no PM) that we miss your recommended driver and we'll add it after let's say 3 or 10 requests.

2007-08-11: changed layout, added list of GPUs and splitted Go 6xxx and Go 7xxx thread

RECOMMENDED DRIVER AS OF 2007-08-11:

Please vote instead of us counting the recommendations :)

WHY AND HOW TO POST

We figured that a moderator led driver recommendation topic is difficult to maintain as we don't have the time and means to test the mobile features plus additionally benchmark the speed for each game of every released driver on all kind of existant NVIDIA GPUs. That's where you come in charge.

In this thread you can post what driver(s) works predominantly bugfree with your NVIDIA-driven laptop. Bugfree for the majority means proper TV-Out and Video Playback, no Standby or Resume from Hibernation issues (no Black Screen), no Lid-closing anomalies, no missing Control Panel, working PowerMizer or a low-level PowerSaving feature (use RivaTuner to check). If this is given, a benchmark comparison between those working drivers is a welcome plus.

As for games: minor Image Quality, low performance (FPS), texture misalignment or other general issues with certain games do NOT prevent a Driver Recommendation, but certainly should be mentioned.

Be specific as possible when describing your recommendation as that's the important part for readers:

1. Laptop:
   make and model
   
2. OS:
   XP, VISTA; 32bit (x86) or 64bit
   
3. DEV_ID & Name:
   What card you use? See list above.
   
4. Driver_Version_Recommended:
   What mobile features you use does work? Is performance great?. Example: "This driver has really good performance in UT3." or "This driver has better quality than xx.xx in game XXX."
   
5. Driver_Version_Avoid:
   Installation fails pityful, BSOD, missing Control Panel etc.
   

Additional information about Benchmark results and OverClocking ability:

• A. Benchmarks:
  with bugfree drivers only; also tell the reader what version of 3DMark you use. HERE's a suggestion of how a nice post layout for your comprehensive benchmarks can look like.
  Please do NOT post benchmarks only. Use the given benchmark threads, open up a new one (with at least 21 compared drivers) or generally use the benchmark section of this forum.
  
• B. OC:
  Overclocking results might also be interesting.
  

Even if you point out one good or bad driver for your card, you have helped the community.

Well enough talk, let the posting began!

Edited September 16, 2007 by ®®®

[Guest Andy Stewart]

Hi! Using a Dell Inspiron 9400, intel 2 core duo at 2gh and 2 gb of ram. I'm using a 7900GS card. The best drivers by far for me anyway have been 158.45. I've tried some of the 160s series of drivers but I've always gone back to 158.45. I'm hoping the 170 series of drivers when they come out will give me an incentive to upgrade but for now I'll stick with what I have as these give me good performance on STALKER, Call of Duty 2 and Battlefield 2142.

[Guest Zappcatt]

I have the same machine...and am using the same driver, 158.45. Good control panel, good performance for newest games(WiC, Halo2 and ShadowRun). Every 160.x driver I have tried so far has had ugly screen corruption on the desktop-alternating lines being displayed, etc.

[Guest James Moore]

I'm running 158.45 on my Dell XPS M1710, GeForce Go 7900 GS. World of Warcraft plays fine, but I'm not much of a gamer so haven't tried anything else.

Earlier versions of the drivers worked very poorly (frequently not at all) for conventional TV output.

[Guest TheMonk]

Been using 162.22 for a while now in Vista and it seems to perform very well. Been playing Command & Conquer 3 with maxed out settings and it runs very well. Only a slight performance drop compared to XP but you have to remember that Vista emulates DX9 so you will get a slight drop in performance.

162.22 highly recommended. I'm using a 7800 GTX Go

[Guest guest]

Hmmm. The file size for the 162.22 should be around 30gb. However, for some reason the laptopvideo2go site lists this as around 30gb and yet the file you download is only around 15gb which means no OpenGl. The files which are only around 15gb do not include OpenGl which is essential for some games. Yes, I've tried installing the 162.22 drivers from laptopvideo2go but essentially the buggers will not install. Perhaps one of the moderators could look into this as it is curious that the official 162.22 drivers WHQL and all that should be around 30gb but the file you actually download from here is only 15gb. In any event I don't think there is that much of a difference between the 162.22 drivers for Vista 32bit and the 158.45 which for me are still the best out there...

[ZappCatt]

Is there anyone here who can "fill us in" on the differing naming conventions?

How about anyone who has done an extensive comparison of features between the numbers.

I know this is not the Mods/Admins job..just wondering if anyone outside has heard.

The reason I ask is the the main way to decide whether you should upgrade ANY software/hardware is the changelog which would talk about performance/bug/feature changes since the LAST RELEASED version. There is no way that the changelog for the 101 series is going to mention what has been changed since the 158 series, etc.

Just a blind shot in the dark, hoping someone could lead us on the right path.

As I mentioned, I am using the 158.45 drivers on my Vista x86 Core 2 Duo laptop with 7900GS from Dell-whos official drivers are from January...I have had corruption on the desktop with all the 163.x drivers I have tried so far..will try the newest once the INF gets updated(I deleted all my other driver folders after setttling back on 158)

[®®®]

It's pretty easy to explain. Over the past years of collecting all driver releases from different sources like Laptop manufacturers it crystalized that NVIDIA is following different driver lines simultaneously... which might be confusing for their developers and is definitely for their customers and people like us who try make decisions which driver to recommend.

There's definitely a line for HP only, Quadros and SONY for example. Another thought is that even a driver for only let's say 8xxx GPUs is developed and maintained. It would be a major project to do the mentioned comparisons.

[Guest Mike]

7900 GS, I use OpenGL and I've yet to find any drivers that work great with OpenGL and most games, videos on the current drivers (not sure which offhand) stutter in full screen, making entertainment not so entertaining.

[StaFForD]

I have a 7900GS and I use the 156.15

works great with OpenGL for CS:CZ and works good with CS:Source and is decent with HL2 and Halo2

[Koralsky]

Well, i have FCS Amilo Pi 1556 with 256 mb GeForce Go 7600. The original drivers that came with the notebook was 8.4.7.1. They are from May 2006. With them i have these results:

Titan Quest: Immortal Throne - 1280x800, everything at max along with AA - 15 to 25 FPS

Overlord - 1280x800, everything at max again, without AA - 11 to 15 FPS

The sad thing is that i collect absolutely the same results from newer driver from Laptopvideo2go like - 6.14.11.6316 and 6.14.11.6315. Absolutely equal performance for these two games. Right now I'm really confuse which "new" driver from here i should choose to have better performance in 3D.

[Guest Zed]

I just read this to find out which driver I should use for my Geforce Go 7600 (Win XP 32bit).

According to the table at the top, the best driver right now recommended by you guys is 162.22 (followed by 158.45).

Went to the download section and found out that these are Vista drivers!!!

So which driver is best for XP???

[ze toni]

:) I tought 162.22 was vista only driver! At least I was unable to find the xp 32bit version...

but, hey nice ideia this Community Led Driver Recommendations :) reall good initiative :P

[Guest Zed]

:) Exactly my point! (read my previous post)...

Can someone help me with this? Which driver is best/recommended for GeForce Go 7600 and XP 32bit???

[6470]

1. Laptop:

Toshiba Satelite a200 1ag

2. OS:

VISTA 32bit

3. DEV_ID & Name:

NVIDIA_G72.DEV_01D7.1 = "NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300

4. Driver_Version_Recommended:

162.22*

Ok just want to say that the 162.22 driver slows down any game, improves graphics performance like shadows but screws up lightning textures like in nfs underground2 plus as I've said slows down games very very much. The important thing is it fixes the "Display Driver nvlddmkm Stopped Responding and Has Successfully Recovered." problem totally in software for modelling like cinema 4d and 3d studio max with bryce 5 and others, improves quality of decoding movies also.

[®®®]

I just read this to find out which driver I should use for my Geforce Go 7600 (Win XP 32bit).

According to the table at the top, the best driver right now recommended by you guys is 162.22 (followed by 158.45).

Went to the download section and found out that these are Vista drivers!!!

So which driver is best for XP???

corrected poll

[Guest Zed]

158.45 is a VISTA driver!!! :)

[®®®]

corrected again and implemented links to driver posts :) thanks.

[Guest Zed]

:) Thanks for taking your time trying to correct this!

Sorry guys, I don't mean to be a pain in your butt, BUT 156.15 is also a Vista driver.

Guess nobody uses XP any more...(?)

[Guest Andy]

The 158.45 are at time of writing still the best drivers out there for vista 32 bit. I've tried most of them but sadly, still keep coming back for these. I say sadly because Nvidia should be releasing better drivers. Hopefully one day they might when the 170.xx drivers come out. Alright some benchmarks. I have a Dell Inspiron 9400 with an Intel 2 core duo running at 2GH with 2MB of Ram clocked at 667Mhz and a 7900GS video card. All the benchmarks were run with me following the usual procedure of visiting the control panel, unistalling Nvidia drivers from there, rebooting and then installing the new drivers. I use 3d mark06.

162.22: a mere 896 marks! I mean WTF!!!!

158.45: 3488 marks

163.11: 3483 marks

So we can see it is a shoot out between the 158.45 and the 163.11. Seeing as there is only 5 marks between them, you make you're own choice. Essentially whatever game runs best for them. For my money, I run STALKER, BF 2142, Call of Duty 2 and Lord of the Rings Shadows of Angmar. It pains me to say this but the 158.45 are still the best drivers out there. Hopefully in a few months time, I DEMAND that Nvidia prove me wrong and release better drivers!!!!

[envydyauser]

Hmmm. The file size for the 162.22 should be around 30gb. However, for some reason the laptopvideo2go site lists this as around 30gb and yet the file you download is only around 15gb which means no OpenGl. The files which are only around 15gb do not include OpenGl ...

Are you sure about this ?

For me the size difference = US or International versions.

# Laptop:

Toshiba Satellite A100-PSAA9

# OS:

XP32bit

# DEV_ID & Name:

GeForce Go 7300

DEV_01D7 SUBSYS_FF101179

# Driver_Version_Recommended:

162.18

tried : 84.68 > 97.92 > 97.94 > 94.24 > 162.18 > 163.16 > 162.18

I don't do games, what I seek is video hardware acceleration for x264-encoded material.

I've read all the PureVideo (SD and HD) blah blah, and I noticed quite a few mentions of PureVideo improvements as ForceWare 9x versions went by.

Reluctantly I tried 162.18 and found it gives great performance (MPEG2 almost entirely offloaded to GPU, pretty good handling of x264 and H264 streams).

Yesterday I tried 163.16 and found it significantly worse than 162.16, so I rolled back.

I have developed my own method of editing INF file, I haven't used the straight modded ones for the 1xx ForceWares.

If anyone is interested in my graphs results of video acceleration, say so here & I'll upload.

cheers

envydyauser

Edited August 20, 2007 by envydyauser

[djgizmo]

Hmm, I looked for the 156.15 XP driver, however, it doesn't seem to exist.

156.10 does and so does 158.16, but not 156.15.

Looks like the poll might be a bit inaccurate.

[tnad]

I wanna figure that out too. I need a driver for my 7900gs on XP. I still use the driver from nvidia. It's over a year old.

[envydyauser]

Maybe you could try what I did :

1. take the "last official inf" (84.63 in your case *OR* your vendor's who maybe got a later one)

2. merge again with whatever version's modded inf (156.x)

3. install 156.x using this multi-tweaked inf.

I've just done this for 162.18 and 163.16 : spent 3 hours merging lines, but at least now I got an INF for my card only (I removed all lines which are n/a).

I decided to do this when Ifound that there were a couple of dozen SUBSYS for the Go 7300 card, each with slightly different values ...

[®®®]

Corrected poll again (removed 158.15 XP32). If people would actually vote, it would be more fun to put in some effort to set it up correctly :) This whole Poll thing was a quick shot and established within 3 minutes and it was meant to be to see how it develops... so not everything is perfect here.

If there is more feedback let it come... i have open ears.

XP32 has now 163.44 (released today and promising)