NVIDIA.com gets over one million Verde notebook driver downloads a month. Why? Well, Verde notebook drivers are what keep your notebook performing at its peak and compatible with the latest GPU-powered applications.
You may have noted that to date we’ve been releasing separate drivers for desktop and notebook users. Today, we are excited to announce that going forward each driver release for Windows Vista and Windows 7 desktop PCs will go out with an equivalent Verde notebook driver. These Verde drivers will support all notebook platforms including Optimus notebooks. The next driver release is coming in May!
If you’re not familiar with the Verde drivers, they’re responsible for ensuring a great notebook experience by enabling things like smoother online video playback with GPU-accelerated Flash 10.1, and the best frame rates in Battlefield: Bad Company 2. They also enable new features for your notebook, like support for NVIDIA 3D Vision and NVIDIA PhysX, to keep it fresh years after purchase. Download the latest NVIDIA Verde drivers here.
A little history…
Prior to 2005, notebook manufacturers didn’t allow graphics hardware vendors to release independent driver updates. Unfortunately, most notebook manufacturers only provided launch drivers. Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games, called this “the secret curse of gaming on laptops.” As new games were hitting the market, old GPU drivers just couldn’t ensure compatibility and peak performance.
That’s about when NVIDIA starting working with top gaming notebook manufacturers to change the playing field. From 2006 to 2008 NVIDIA released notebook driver updates for a select group of gaming notebooks. And, in 2008, as mainstream GPU-accelerated applications were growing and, for the first time, notebook PC unit sales exceeded desktop PC sales, NVIDIA announced the Verde driver program for notebook PCs. The program offered driver support for all notebook PCs from the low-end to the high-end and supported most notebook manufacturers as well as all of their customizations.
After one year, NVIDIA Verde drivers had delivered an average of a 30% performance boost across many top gaming applications and support for numerous new products and APIs like:
- DirectCompute
- CUDA 1.0/2.0/3.0
- OpenCL. OpenGL 3.0/3.1/3.2
- Flash 10.1
- PhysX
- 3D Vision
- 300 SLI profiles, and SLI multi-mon support
