There have been rumours on the net for number of weeks now about whether we will see Detonator 50 and when they will appear, will they be released for Windows 64bit only or will we see them released for all Windows OS?. Nvidia would not confirm or deny anything in public relating to that as one of their current policies is not to talk about rumours or unannounced products or software. That might change if you can believe Derek Perez of Nvidia in the latest DriverHeaven interview. Click on Read More for the full story.
Well, let me first say I?m about to lay some rumours to rest for you just in case Derek wouldn?t be prepared to do that just yet. Detonator 50 drivers do exist and not only for Windows XP 64bit. They will be available for Windows 9x through to 2003. The date? That is yet to be decided I presume but it cannot be far away. Why not? The drivers have been slowly maturing from the initial 50.00 release to the current known 51.60 release dated maybe only 2 weeks ago. By now, the latest driver version could even be 52.00.
Now we get to the proof that these drivers really exist and have been in development for a while now. On Monday 25th of August 2003, InnoVision ? one of Nvidia OEM?s have posted for download the very latest version of WDM Nvidia drivers. Their version is 2.09 and they are dated 19th of August 2003.
Now you might notice that many if not all Nvidia drivers today contain a setup program that can install the drivers for you automatically, although you can still update the drivers manually. This applies to standard Nvidia vga drivers, nForce1/2/3 drivers and wdm drivers of course. With the small setup program come two .cab files, data1.cab and data2.cab. One of them is usually very small in size and other a bit bigger. I always wondered what they contain but could never find a program to open them as they do not appear to open with a standard compression utilities. It turns out, I didn?t have to open them, I could just run setup.exe and go through the installation procedure until a screen asking you to restart now or later comes up. If you minimize the program at that time and then visit your temporary files directory, you will see a new folder created. Mine was called ?{b023185f-f1ef-4f97-b0bd-ae6d802226d1}? yours could be different, I don?t know. In that folder lies the content of the data1.cab and data2.cab files. You can imagine my surprise when I saw a file there called NvInst32.dll ( a standard NVIDIA driver installation file containing all supported NVIDIA products ) with a file version of 51.60 ( 4.14.10.5160 )! Having discovered this I then went back to several previous Nvidia WDM and nForce drivers and discovered that some of them contained past versions of 5x.xx drivers as well like 51.20 or 50.00 (depending how far back in time you go) etc. They are genuine Nvidia driver files and you can examine them yourself.
Detonator 40 was launched on 29th August 2002 and its version was just 40.41. The recent rumours suggest that ATI is about to launch a new card, a refresh to the already popular R3xx core within 4-6 weeks. If review samples will be available then ? Nvidia would want to have Detonator 50 released by that time so that they could be used in the reviews where performance comparisons can be made between new ATI product and Nvidia?s products with the latest revision driver. Just something for you to think about?also, the 51.60 installation driver file did contain strings for NV36 and NV38, NV38-U chipsets so could they be not so far away as well??
Now we get to the proof that these drivers really exist and have been in development for a while now. On Monday 25th of August 2003, InnoVision ? one of Nvidia OEM?s have posted for download the very latest version of WDM Nvidia drivers. Their version is 2.09 and they are dated 19th of August 2003.
Now you might notice that many if not all Nvidia drivers today contain a setup program that can install the drivers for you automatically, although you can still update the drivers manually. This applies to standard Nvidia vga drivers, nForce1/2/3 drivers and wdm drivers of course. With the small setup program come two .cab files, data1.cab and data2.cab. One of them is usually very small in size and other a bit bigger. I always wondered what they contain but could never find a program to open them as they do not appear to open with a standard compression utilities. It turns out, I didn?t have to open them, I could just run setup.exe and go through the installation procedure until a screen asking you to restart now or later comes up. If you minimize the program at that time and then visit your temporary files directory, you will see a new folder created. Mine was called ?{b023185f-f1ef-4f97-b0bd-ae6d802226d1}? yours could be different, I don?t know. In that folder lies the content of the data1.cab and data2.cab files. You can imagine my surprise when I saw a file there called NvInst32.dll ( a standard NVIDIA driver installation file containing all supported NVIDIA products ) with a file version of 51.60 ( 4.14.10.5160 )! Having discovered this I then went back to several previous Nvidia WDM and nForce drivers and discovered that some of them contained past versions of 5x.xx drivers as well like 51.20 or 50.00 (depending how far back in time you go) etc. They are genuine Nvidia driver files and you can examine them yourself.
Detonator 40 was launched on 29th August 2002 and its version was just 40.41. The recent rumours suggest that ATI is about to launch a new card, a refresh to the already popular R3xx core within 4-6 weeks. If review samples will be available then ? Nvidia would want to have Detonator 50 released by that time so that they could be used in the reviews where performance comparisons can be made between new ATI product and Nvidia?s products with the latest revision driver. Just something for you to think about?also, the 51.60 installation driver file did contain strings for NV36 and NV38, NV38-U chipsets so could they be not so far away as well??
