Drivers and Installation

Driver version?

The driver installation disc contains the ASUS Win9X 5.22E, Windows 2000 3.84E drivers and Windows NT 4.0 drivers. ASUS modified these drivers to support the video I/O features and the stereoscopic glasses. The drivers for Windows 2000 are based on the 3.84 reference drivers, and as such do not contain FSAA support or the large framerate increase.

Considering that the latest official W2K reference driver is version 5.22, I found it a bit odd that ASUS based the V7700 Deluxe shipping driver on the older 3.84s. I fired off an e-mail to ASUS asking about the difference in driver versions, and I received this response:

After evaluating these drivers, we found that the v3.84 was a little more stable than v5.22 and spent less system memory. So we decided to use v3.84 as the first release driver. In the mean time, we are working on v5.33 Win9x/Win2K drivers and will release them very soon.

What ASUS is saying here is that they feel that overall stability rather than speed is going to be more important to the owner of the V7700 Deluxe. These users most likely bought the card primarily for its video editing features, with gaming as a secondary consideration. Preliminary tests indicated that the v3.84 W2K drivers did not perform as well as the reference 5.22s. ASUS has just sent us a prerelease copy of the 5.33 drivers for Win9X. These will be tested at a later date.

The installation

After inserting the driver disk, the ASUS installation program went right to work. It played a neat little animated movie of the ASUS logo, and then presented me with the installation options. The installer takes care of detecting what operating system you are running and will install the appropriate drivers accordingly. After installing the drivers, the program will check and update the DirectX if needed. In the last step of the installation, the installer informed me of the type of chipset my system had, and offered to install the correct AGP GART driver. This is a nice touch because having the newest AGP GART driver is essential to getting the best performance out of the V7700 Deluxe.

The VR Controls

W2K Advanced Controls

The included ASUS 5.22e Win9X drivers are specially modified to support the advanced video functions of the card, and are required if you intend to use video input and capture functions on the V7700 Deluxe. Preliminary tests indicated that the ASUS supplied 5.22e drivers for Windows 9X actually slightly outperformed the NVIDIA reference 5.22s.