NVIDIA Geforce 600M series drivers?

Anyone heard anything about an expected release date for the official 600M series GPU drivers? Currently the 640M, 650M, 660M, 670M, 675M & even 680M have no driver support meaning poor performance and frequent crashes/bugs. Apparently it should be fixed by the next driver release but when is that meant to be? Some people have owned laptops with these GPUs for months now yet there is still no driver love from NVIDIA! I can't imagine they'd release their flagship 680M with no driver support, surely?

 

the 670m and 675m should be ok since they are just rebrands of 570m and 580m...however, the kepler chips are new and probably unsupported as of yet.

This is just to show that the reputation for Nvidia being on the ball with drivers is exaggerated...but just to be fair, kepler mobile is new and it will always take time.

 

the latest works for some people but not others.
i would never use these myself but might be worth having a look at the modified inf from http://laptopvideo2go.com/

 

Nvidia does support the 600M GPU's. Your OEM might have opted out of the driver support from Nvidia. Blame your OEM.

You can make a modded inf yourself, it's not hard to make one. Nvidia video drivers are unified, they will work with any Nvidia GPU.

 

^ Yes except unified drivers does not mean they will be optimized for all GPUs. A smaller fab process cannot be fully taken advantage of unless you have dedicated drivers. For the 600m series, on nvidia's website, only three low end GPUs are supported, out of which one is the rebranded 555m.

 

Nvidia only changes the settings in the INF's for the newer GPU's, not the actual driver. The driver (the system file) is still the same for all the GPU's.

When you copy over the settings from the OEM provided INF, the modded driver will work like the original dedicated driver.

 

the driver is proprietary, so there's little point in guessing how the actual driver functions. we know it's unified, which means that there is a single driver from the perspective of the operating system. That's it.

 

Nvidia's manual download page for 600M only shows 3 cards supported: 610M, 630M, and 635M. I'm not sure you can call that "support".

 

650 works with modified INF. I'm using 301.40 as most of the users says this is just a tad more stable than the WHQL 301.42 for some reason.

Verified D3, BF3 MW3 and others.

 

As I said before, blame your OEM, not Nvidia.

 

I do not see what his comment has to do with his OEM. nvidia designed the card. They should write drivers for it. OEMs should not have to create software for hardware that was not designed by them. If that is the case, why release drivers at all? Why did nv release drivers for those two? Why did nvidia release drivers for their desktop GPUs? They do not even manufacture them.

Also, unless you are an nv employee that wrote these drivers, there is no way of telling what they really do with them. So let's not speculate.

 

Nvidia does release the drivers for all their mobile GPU's, but some OEM's opt out of the driver support directly from Nvidia, ex: Sony. I have to depend on the modded INF, since my Vaio's 8400M GT is not supported by the Nvidia's driver releases.

OEM's tell Nvidia what feature sets have to be included for their GPU's. Nvidia writes the driver, not the OEM's.

 

What I was referring to was NVIDIA's manual driver downloads, not the auto detect feature. It's not that these GPUs are being blocked at the driver level, it's that they don't exist at all according to NVIDIA's website - which you can access from any machine from any OEM (even my phone!) and still get no option for manual driver updates.

It's a shame as all the benchmarking people have done are with generic drivers or modded drivers which aren't optimised for these GPUs, especially the Kepler architecture. If we have driver support I'm sure performance accross the board will improve not to mention stability and reliability.

I don't think it's a question of 'if?' but simply 'when?'. All mobile GPUs from 8000M to 500M series are currently supported. However, literally months have gone by now, making it seem like NVIDIA really are dragging their feet on this issue.

 

^ What he said. I can find the nvidia drivers from a laptop equipped with an AMD card. Whilst that is not true for me, that and Cakerfish's phone example will hopefully make you understand what we are trying to say. Go to nvs website, look for drivers YOURSELF and come back and tell us whether you see support for the 600m series other than the base three. As such, no, nvidia has not yet released drivers for the higher end 600m GPUs. While they may or may not do this eventually (mostly may), we need to see driver support WHEN the GPU releases. Otherwise it is simply unfair to those who are purchasing early on and using modded drivers.

 

It took Nvidia, a bit more than a few months to release official drivers for the 500m series when they came out.

Just wait for it.

 

I think that you misunderstood me. By OEM's, I meant the companies like Sony, HP, etc. Nvidia doesn't release their notebook drivers for all OEM's. I do know that there is no driver listing for the higher end 600M GPU's.

See here, under the "supported products" tab.
NVIDIA DRIVERS 301.42WHQL

From the notes, Sony opted out of the driver support for it's older GPU's (my 8400M GT is one of them).

 

Ah yes but what we are saying is that NVIDIA have not yet provided drivers to any OEM, even those which are opted in with the Verde driver scheme!

 

^ Again, what he said

 

The next major driver release would support all the 600M's.

Official WHQL NVIDIA 301.42 Display Driver Feedback Thread For NVIDIA Geforce Desktop/Notebook/ION GPUs Released - NVIDIA Forums

 

^ Exactly! It sucks that they do not release drivers along with the GPUs. The 660m has been out for over a month and half already. Why are the drivers so late?

 

I am sure that if you buy a machine with 660M, it would have the driver already. But the driver would be a older version.

 

Like others have said, the Manufacturer of your laptop will/should have the driver you need. Additional drivers may not be supported until future releases.

What drivers do you have installed now? Pretty much anything 30X.XX is up to date [I understand you may still want a newer driver].

 

Driver 295.55. Which is not optimised for Kepler in anyway. I'm getting strange glitches in a number of games.

That next official release can't come quickly enough!

 

They probably waited for 680M to be released, so they could add driver support for that one as well instead of leaking names and such for an unreleased GPU within the Release notes that accompany the drivers