Nvidia Finally Unveils the DirectX 10 Driver

No, you still won’t be able to get it for the moment but at least now we all know it works. Because CES is all about showcasing the goods, Nvidia thought it was a good idea to show a final version of its most awaited Vista driver for the G80 series. And so they did. For those of you who didn’t make it to CES I have to say that the Crysis engine works flawlessly on the new platform. I don’t know if it was indeed a DirectX 10 game (because Nvidia hasn’t commented anything on the subject) but it looked better than any other game I’ve seen in the last months.

So finally Nvidia has a working Vista 32 bit driver. As you can see from the blurry picture, the driver’s version is 10.30 meaning that Nvidia has indeed developed a new generation of drivers just for Vista. The driver is a “non-public” beta version but the final one should be available soon. And by the looks of Crysis running smoothly at 60+ FPS the software side seems to be quite functional.

All being taken into account, some 19 days remain until the launch of Vista and that’s enough for Nvidia’s driver to mature. Actually, there aren’t any games (aside from Crysis which is “supposed” to be a DirectX 10 title) which need a DirectX 10 platform in order to run, but several companies (including Futuremark and its upcoming 3DMark 2007) have announced that they will launch DirectX 10 compatible applications in the next 3 months. Sadly, there is no news regarding a possible 64-bit Vista driver for the 8800 series.