Q&A (cont’d)

FiringSquad: With its radically different stream architecture, you’ve split off your GeForce 8800 driver from the rest of your older GeForce graphics cards. Did this cause added strain on your driver development for Vista, and how is the driver group organized now?

Dwight Diercks: No, this did not cause strain and, in fact we have not split off the GeForce 8800 driver from the rest of our GeForce GPUs. ForceWare Release 100 was originally released as a Beta for GeForce 8800 series GPUs since these customers did not have a driver to use yet, and our focus was on getting the WHQL logo for those products. The fact is Release 100 supports GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs, and you can download and run v100.54 or v100.59. We updated the v97.46 driver download pages on January 30th to let those customers know we had a Beta driver for them to download.


FiringSquad: Could you go over some of the differences in coding for the GeForce 8800 driver versus previous GeForce cards? In light of its unified shading architecture, this would make life a little more difficult for you driver guys would it not? As you’ve got to keep the stream processors running as efficiently as possible, surely that’s an added challenge correct?

Dwight Diercks: GPU’s are probably the largest programmable device in the world, and the level of programming complexity seems to grow each year. For example, the GeForce 8800 family adds new driver requirements for DirectX 10 in addition to DirectX 9 support, HD DVD/Blu-ray drivers for NVIDIA PureVideo HD, and NVIDIA SLI for both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. All of this adds to the complexity factor and to the volume of code required to keep a GPU operating at peak efficiency.

We will be the first company to submit hardware for DirectX 10 WHQL certification, and the challenge in getting WHQL certification for a new API is that you’ll find some issues where the tests need to change, and other issues where the drivers need to change. At this point we’re down to a handful of bugs that we still need to fix, and we expect to finish this week.

FiringSquad: How hard is it programming for Vista’s new driver model?

Dwight Diercks: Vista requires an entirely new driver model for graphics. It moves much of the driver from kernel space to user space. It changes how basic display is handled, and it removes older driver portions of the code that have been there since NT4.0 days. In addition, high definition video (Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD) has a completely new architecture for video acceleration. So it is not hard to program for the Vista driver model, its just different than Windows XP. We have tens of millions of users of our XP drivers, so we are maintaining two large simultaneous driver bases, which results in additional software engineering complexity.

FiringSquad: Last year you stated that you planned to add additional overclocking functionality in nTune for GeForce 8800 cards, including the ability to independently overclock the stream processors. How is work progressing on this version of nTune, and when can we expect it to be released?

Dwight Diercks: This is already supported in nTune, but it requires some special code in our GPU drivers to support it. We are working on this now and we expect to support it in the March timeframe.

FiringSquad: Can you give us an ETA on when you’ll have nForce drivers available for Vista for the following chipsets: nForce4 family; nForce 5 family (both AMD and Intel); nForce 680i.

Dwight Diercks: Vista drivers support all nForce products out of the box. Users can now download WHQL nForce drivers directly from www.nvidia.com for all nForce4, nForce5 and nForce 600 series products.



On behalf of FiringSquad, we’d like to thank NVIDIA’s Dwight Diercks for taking time out of his day to answer our questions on ForceWare support for Vista. We look forward to seeing how the new ForceWare 100 series drivers progress over the course of 2007, and definitely can’t wait to get our hands on the updated drivers with additional overclocking support built-in!