Last week both ATI and Nvidia released updated, WHQL-certified drivers for Windows Vista. The ATI drivers are working fine here on my main system, and I’m about to update the Nvidia drivers on a test machine.
I’ve got download links and more information over at ZDNet. I’m especially interested in feedback from the gaming community. Are these drivers an improvement?
More: Are ATI and Nvidia doing enough with their Vista drivers?
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
The latest Catalyst drivers for Vista still do not include one for the tuner subsystem on the ATI All-in-Wonder cards. So, these cards are useless under Vista for their intended main purpose: watching and recording live TV. I’m surprised no bloggers have taken up this issue yet. Maybe you can, so that some pressure can be brought to bear on AMD/ATI to give us back the capabilities we lost when we upgraded to Vista!.
Just upgraded for my AGP (gack) ATI 9550. It’s a workhorse card, nothing fancy, and the new drivers seem to run fine. HOWEVER — I did have intermittent lockups with ATI-provided drivers before as opposed to MS-provided WHQL drivers. So I’m on guard.
I have an nVidia-based chipset and what’s hurting me on Vista is not graphics drivers, which are OK, but chipset drivers. nVidia is still offering the 15.00 nForce February 5th drivers for Vista. Can’t use them–the RAID driver bluescreens and the NIC driver will regularly lose its connection with the hardware (the NIC becomes disabled in sleep mode and you have to shutdown and drop all power for it to come back.)
I’ve got a Geforce 6200(AGP 4x) running under Windows Vista Ultimate. The nVidia driver fails at least two to three times a day, after which my screen goes blank for a couple of seconds & then suddenly the driver successfully recovers itself. I’ve send report after report to M$ about this problem & when the new nVidia drivers were released a couple of days back, i expected this problem to be fixed. But, Alas it’s still there. I’ve got so sick of this & other problems in vista that i’ve said enough is enough & went back to XP Pro.
Thanks for the tip. I need these drivers.
I’m in the process of upgrading my motherboard and processor to AMD Athlon 64 X2 (dual-core). This is my first venture into both AMD and 64-bit land. I’ll be installing Windows XP Professional 64-bit edition first because I have to wait for Microsoft to ship my 64-bit install disk for Vista Business. I have Vista Ultimate that I downloaded as a gift from the beta test, but their site will not accept my product key to get a 64-bit disk. Maybe my Utimate product key will work on the 64-bit Business disk. I’ll let you know.
Follow-up: It’s been two days of almost nonstop use since I installed the new ATI drivers. No problems at all.
I have a HP Pavilion dv9074 laptop with Nvidia 7600 Go. After installing these drivers my Windows Experience Index score for 3d Gaming went from 4.5 to 4.1. Haven’t tested it in real life applications yet, but must admit I am a little disappointed with this fact. For all I know these drivers are not meant for the Go versions, but yet….
Interesting, Ken. My scores went down as well, from a 4.7/4.2 (Aero/Gaming) to a 4.5/4.1. This is with an X1300 Pro.
[H] has a new article on new Vista drivers for ATI and Nvidia.
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTM0NywxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
It seems right now ATI’s drivers are getting very good. Nvidia is still lagging a little.
Seems like the performance delta (XP vs Vista) is smaller for ATI than for NVIDIA at the moment. I think I’m going to hold out a bit longer until the graphics drivers have matured and there are actually DX10 games out there (Crytech’s new stuff and of course UT III). It seems like if I do upgrade my card, and switch to Vista, I’ll only be able to play my old games slower (discounting the fancy new OS’s features which while being very interesting are not compelling enough for an upgrade just yet)??
Chris, I have the same problem: “my screen goes blank for a couple of seconds & then suddenly the driver successfully recovers itself”. Thinking that this was a problem with my hardware or Windows I typed the message in Google. Surprise! I found a 20-page thread about it. It seems a lot of people are having this problem… and M$ ignored once more.
Hello,
i have hp pavilion dv9292eu (dv9000 series) with nvidia 7600. my notebook shows blue screen of death at irregular intervals as well as the blanking out thing. i learnt from a forum dat nvidia doesn’t really have any driver which works Vista well (yeah i have home premium)…some also said an earlier version of their drivers handle the OS better. i’m wondering…does anyone have similar issue and with dis driver update, does it fix it…even if the windows experience decrease?
i have an amd with vista home premium. the notebook is hp pavilion dv9292eu with nvidia 7600. with the black flickers i also have irregular blue screen of death episodes. some forum i visited once said installing an older drive…i forget which one…would solve the problem…but i donno. so i wondering if anyone has similar problems and if this update addresses it.
Chuka, sorry for the delay getting your comment approved.
You should not be getting a blue screen error from a video driver under Vista. That was one of the major changes made in the Vista architecture – video drivers are out of the kernel space. If I were you I would look for unsigned drivers on your system first. Any of those hanging around?
I would like the second the comments made by Ian Easson – ATI hasn’t done a real good job at providing Vista drivers for the great line of products they have to offer. I’m the proud owner of a Radeon x1300 (AIW) card, but I will have to go back to MCE 2005 due to the lack of drivers and support for the live tv/capture and FM radio fuctionalities when attempting to use the media center application. 😦