Thursday, March 12, 2009

Upgrading your Nvidia Driver

Well, Why do you need to upgrade your Nvidia Driver?
  1. Better Performance (usually)
  2. New Features (PhyX,CUDA,Ambient Occlusion)
  3. Because you are using an Nvidia Card ! Those people using ATi Card will have to stare at your drivers which are more updated then theirs. They have to wait ... until their vendors release the drivers. Only Nvidia provide Mobile Driver support ATi passes on the responsibility to vendors
You don't have to worry about driver stability
In all my previous updates experience I didn't encounter any unstable Nvidia Drivers at all hence very unlikely

First Download GPUZ from the internet to determine your Device ID
You can also determine your Device ID by looking at the Device Manager but it is too tedious to write so I skipped it =)


Your Device ID is where I circled in RED

Next Download the New Drivers from LaptopVideo2Go here

Enter your Device ID as follows
Download any Driver they will all work but of course it is the later the better =)

Next go to Control Panel to remove the Nvidia Display Driver only

Reboot as your Computer tells you to

Then extract the New downloaded Driver
Double Click on Setup.exe
You will see some Driver Not WHQL Warning if you are installing Non WHQL Driver
Just ignore it
After installation you can delete the folder where you extracted the driver

After that check if PowerMizer is enabled here
Sometimes Beta Driver Releases leave out PowerMizer settings (Don't know why ) although all Nvidia Drivers support PowerMizer settings

Below are some new features highlights in my new 185.20 Driver




Thanks to LaptopVideo2go for providing the Drivers & GPUZ for the Wonderful Utility

Note:
Once you install certain drivers you might not be able to install driver version 185.20. This is probably due to incompatibilities in the Control Panel Version, I have yet to find a way to resolve it.

Edit:
The latest driver is no longer 185.20
For details on the latest Nvidia Released Driver click here

2 comments:

  1. my nvidia control panel does not have the "set physx configuration" tap in the 3D settings section.

    so how do i enable it?

    current installed forceware is 186.81 which supposedly included the nvidia physx.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nvidia broke the Control Panel for PhysX don't worry that bug is with Nvidia not specific to your computer.

    ReplyDelete