Changes to official Nvidia line on Forceware?

[marftarf]

I hadn't been directly to the Nvidia driver site for a while, but I remember the last time I was there it had warnings all over it that said the Unified Driver Forceware stuff didn't apply to mobile GPUs and you could only get updated drivers from the notebook manufacturer. I went there today (for no good reason) and noticed it now says under GeForce4 go that one of the "benefits and features" is:

Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)

Part of the NVIDIA Forceware unified software environment (USE). The NVIDIA UDA guarantees forward and backward compatibility with software drivers. Simplifies upgrading to a new NVIDIA product because all NVIDIA products work with the same driver software.

(see link)

then I also noticed this on the general write up about UDA:

The NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) is the foundation for the company?s award-winning ForceWare drivers and delivers forward-and-backward compatibility across all implementations of NVIDIA desktop, workstation, mobile, platform, and multimedia processors.

and

ForceWare software supports the entire line of TNT2? processors, the GeForce? consumer line of GPUs, the NVIDIA nForce? platform processors, the NVIDIA Quadro® line of professional GPUs, as well as the full line of NVIDIA mobile processors.

(see link)

this was surprising to me but for a lark, I tried out the regular 61.77 from their website, launching the install .exe. I recall earlier versions quitting out of the install process when they figured out the adapter was a mobile, but this time it didn't it went through the whole install process and then asked me to restart, as if everything had installed. Imagine my excitement! But when I came back to the desktop after restarting, low and behold I was still at 52.16, it hadn't actually updated anything.

I wonder if/why they changed their description of compatability but not the actual compatability of the unified driver thingee?

not that it matters...

[mobilenvidia]

nVidia still stick to their orignal plan that Laptop OEM's update the drivers them selves.

Mobile drivers require many OEM INF settings, would make a huge INF for nVidia to upkeep if all possibilities were added for Laptops.

This is the reason nVidia don't make the INF compatable for laptops, as the OEM's add all those setting specific for their machine.

For some reason laptops need very specific timings and settings, which complicates things.

So any driver you see @nVidia is for desktops only!

This is where we come in, over the last year or so, I have found that all those OEM settings arn't really needed, laptops work just fine without them.

You'll find that the INFs I just started to make with no tweaks what so ever (basicly a true UDA INF) will work just fine as well for most laptops.

Basicly, nVidia leaves it to the OEM to update the drivers, in my books not really good enough as the mobile GPU's should also be UDA (my INFs have proven that it works for 99% of laptops)

I hope this explains it a little