Laptops aren’t known for graphics, but that’s no excuse for poor performance. If you bought a laptop with a dedicated Nvidia GPU, you can now go directly to their site and download new drivers which should make overall performance much faster.
Navigating to this page will bring up the menu above. Find your operating system and you’re almost there! (If you don’t know which GPU you have, one way to find that out is by pressing windows key + r, typing “dxdiag”, and seeing what it says under the “display” tab.)
Nvidia has a few warnings for you before you download, but they do a good job of walking you through them. You’ll want to check your computer/GPU against a long list of acceptable GPUs, and also against a short list of unacceptable laptop lines. Chances are if your notebook isn’t extremely old you’ve got one of the GPUs listed, but it’s good to check. Unfortunately if you’ve got a Dell Vostro, Lenovo ThinkPad or Sony VAIO you’re out of luck and will need to contact the notebook OEM for support. If you’ve got a computer with hybrid SLI you’re also out of luck, but only for now, as Nvidia will support SLI in a later release.
The other thing you should do before you download the new drivers is backup. Nvidia provides a link for how to do this in XP or in Vista through either System Restore or through rolling back. It’s a good idea to backup your drivers because the GPU is an essential part of your computer, powering things as basic and the graphical user interface you use to interact with your computer. Nothing should go wrong, but if something does, it will be much easier to correct the problem if you have backed up properly first.
Finally, there’s a quick note for certain Dell users with GeForce GPUs. Grab the extra update provided by Nvidia’s link and you should be all set.
Then you’re ready to download and install! The new drivers have already shown to improve performance in a number of applications, and if you’ve been craving a performance boost this is a great one for free. The Beta version of the drivers is out now, but if you’re the cautious type WHQL certified versions will be out early next year. (press release)
This is a guest post from LaptopLogic.com – head over to them to read laptop reviews, browse the latest news and find cheap laptops.
I hate it when I have a friend coming over bringing his laptop to play some network games with me, to find out that he’s not using an NVIDIA card
Almost every game nowadays require one to play (on the laptop)
I hate it when I have a friend coming over bringing his laptop to play some network games with me, to find out that he’s not using an NVIDIA card
Almost every game nowadays require one to play (on the laptop)