I’m a massive nvidia fan, always have been since they bought 3dfx all those years ago.

They have a good reputation for producing quality components and also good quality drivers to back up those components.

I recently purchased a 7600GS 512MB graphics card for my home machine. It’s only a AMD 64 3400+ machine with 2GB of RAM and an ageing motherboard.

The card’s brilliant, however the drivers are not so…

Problem being I run Vista and XP, I’d really like to let go of my XP installation but the lack of performance graphics support for Vista is putting me off.

I today installed nvidias latest offering (158.18). It took four restarts to install!! FOUR!

I dont even play games that much but I like the half life series of games including the online multiplayers, so reasonable graphics drivers are important.

The first observation after the latest installation is the Windows Experience score has now gone down, rather than up which doesnt bother me too much.

Secondly the frames per second performance, although now does peak a little higher than before its very varied, day of defeat source runs anywhere in between 20fps to 60fps which is quite a large margin.

To make matters worse at the bottom of the driver download page is this:

“These NVIDIA Windows Vista drivers are under development. This version is not fully optimized for full 3D performance and may not include all available features available on different operating systems. NVIDIA, along with the industry, is continuing to update its Windows Vista drivers to ensure maximum performance on 3D applications and add support for features.”

UNDER DEVELOPMENT!