Users of Windows Vista and nVidia's GeForce 8800 graphics cards can almost rejoice!
nVidia plan on releasing a Vista beta driver to their website for public download on Tuesday, January 30th which includes SLI support. D3D performance is set to be improved over the Release 95 Vista drivers, and is on par with Windows XP games and applications in some cases (except OpenGL).
Driver Description: This driver is intended for testing on GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS series GPUs. This driver is intended for DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 application testing in single GPU only. It is not recommended for NVIDIA SLI testing. 3D performance of this driver is improved over Release 95 Vista drivers, and is on par with Windows XP for the top applications, with the exception of OpenGL applications. This driver can also be used with GeForce 7 and GeForce 6 series GPUs, though performance can be slower on some applications because we still have work to do on our drivers. Our goal is to get Vista performance equivalent to XP performance wherever possible, and we will do this through continuous driver updates.
NVIDIA's plan is to make a driver available for end users on NVIDIA.com on January 30, 2007. This driver is a beta driver and the first SLI driver, intended to support GeForce 8, 7, and 6 series GPUs, and will add support for GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS DirectX 9 SLI on the top applications. NVIDIA will continue to work on optimizing our Windows Vista drivers to ensure maximum performance on 3D applications.
In addition, NVIDIA is working very closely with Microsoft to finalize the WHQL certified DirectX 10 driver for the GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS GPU. Both companies have been in close communication to ensure that the logo kit gets finalized to enable the certification of the driver as soon as possible to enable getting it into the hands of customers.
100.54 will be out around the same the time of the Windows Vista release but what do AMD and ATI have up their sleeves? Only we know but you will soon, too!