NVIDIA ForceWare Release 55

Chaos

SANTA CLARA, CA—MARCH 15, 2004—NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, today announced the availability of the NVIDIA® ForceWare™ Release 55 graphics driver for add-in graphics cards based on NVIDIA GeForce™ graphics processing units (GPUs). This new release includes many new features, tools and enhancements, including customized application and game profile settings, and support for PCI Express. The Microsoft WHQL-certified NVIDIA ForceWare Release 55 driver is immediately available for download at www.nvidia.com/drivers.

“Forceware Release 55 delivers awesome new features which are only available on NVIDIA GPUs,” said Dan Vivoli, executive vice president of marketing at NVIDIA. “Along with these new features, every customer using an NVIDIA-based graphics card manufactured in the last six years—all the way back to the NVIDIA TNT™—will get another free performance upgrade simply by installing this software.”

“NVIDIA’s latest driver set certainly brings with it a number of nice improvements that all NVIDIA owners will enjoy,” said Brandon Bell, editor in chief of hardware for Firingsquad.com (www.firingsquad.com). “When you add all this up with the performance improvements we saw in Unreal Tournament 2003, we definitely like NVIDIA’s latest graphics driver.”

“There is no doubt NVIDIA has the most feature rich drivers on the market when it comes to video cards,” said Brent Justice, 3D graphics editor of HardOCP (www.hardocp.com). “We are simply in love with the game profiles features. This is a gaming feature we have been wanting for a very long time.”

New features in the new ForceWare Release 55 graphics driver include:

* Application/game profiles—image quality and performance settings can be defined and saved for each application. Profiles launch automatically when the program is initiated. Adjustments can be made easily to any existing profile.
* Introduction of PCI Express—support for the latest PC bus enabled through NVIDIA UDA
* The latest NVIDIA nView® 3.5 software—a new nView multi-display wizard speeds the set up for multi-display modes. nView 3.5 also provides numerous enhancements for more efficiently using a single display including an enhanced display grid technology for organizing windows on your desktop and a pop-up blocker to stop unwanted windows.
* Easy output of video files to television—when selecting a video file for output, a simple right-click on the mouse pops up a menu to speed start up and simplify the selection of video output options.
* Mouse-over pop-up help for all graphics control panels—an integrated help function provides pop-up explanations of all graphics-related settings.
* Drop-down menu for NVIDIA settings—a new menu item on the right-click drop-down menu takes users directly to a control panel for NVIDIA graphics settings.

Thanks to the NVIDIA unified driver architecture (UDA), NVIDIA ForceWare Release 55 delivers a free performance upgrade for NVIDIA GPUs, both past and present. With the new driver, GeForce™ FX 5900XT GPU performance in F1 Challenge ’99-’02 can increase as much as 120[i] percent. In Gunmetal, GeForce FX 5200 GPU performance increases up to 22[ii] percent and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra GPU performance in Neverwinter Nights goes up as much as 48[iii] percent faster.

By utilizing the Company’s unique UDA, NVIDIA ForceWare Release 55 supports all NVIDIA graphics solutions for PCI, AGP, and PCI Express bus architectures with a single driver version. The NVIDIA ForceWare Release 55 driver, complete with Microsoft WHQL certification, is immediately available for download at www.nvidia.com/drivers/

Chaos

Surprise, Surprise on the UT2004 release date they happen to release new WHQL drivers

Sourcer_2002

wow it has a pop up blocker lol!

GerbilJammer

The funny thing is, when I installed these on my Geforce FX 5200, it told me the drivers weren't WHQL. :O I obtained the English set off of their FTP before they updated their site. Is it possible I got some betas?