Nvidia notebook drivers now available directly

Nvidia has made a surprise revelation this afternoon, announcing that it now offers upgradeable notebook graphics drivers for download directly from the company's website.

This will enable owners of notebooks with Nvidia GeForce 8M, 9M and Quadro NVS mobile GPUs to take advantage of new features and performance optimisations as they become available.

The first notebook specific driver release will extend the Nvidia CUDA architecture to notebook GPUs, "enabling the growing number of consumers moving to a notebook-only lifestyle to immediately experience the wide range of CUDA-based applications," according to a statement from Nvidia.

Nvidia has released a beta driver, which is available for Windows Vista x86, Windows Vista x64, Windows XP and Windows XP x64, but the company warns that they don't work with Dell Vostro, Lenovo ThinkPad and Sony Vaio notebooks, along with notebooks that utilize Hybrid SLI technology. These should all be supported in a forthcoming release expected in early 2009.

We think this is great news for notebook owners and it's something we've been pushing Nvidia and ATI to do for a long while. A gaming notebook where you can't update the drivers to the latest version just isn't a gaming notebook, in our opinion – now all we've got to do is keep pushing ATI to do the same.

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