What are the best Nvidia Drivers?

[cMoAyRoItOe]

Hey all, i been wondering quite a while, Nvidia allways comes out woth new drivers, and i noticed that some run better then others, like the newest once arent allways the best. So im wonderign what do ya think, are the fastest ones out there. i allways thought that the 40.72s run really nice.

Whats your oppinion?

[ShawnD1]

The best drivers I have come across are the ones included with the video card because they are specifically made for the card you have. Example, the drivers that came with my GeForce2 allow me to set the core and memory clock speeds for the card. Drivers downloaded from the Nvidia website do not allow you to do that.

[Micro Bean]

The drivers you are refering to on the website that are for your cards is an updated drivers which fixes certain problems people come across with certain OS systems. Thats not necessarily true that the drivers you get with card are best they can be not all the time they can to cause problem and havok

[goldenbuddha]

Yup I would like to mention that when the first generation Radeon's were released, the drivers that came with it was probably the worst ever.

It would crash in all manner of ways.. very evil.. but as time progressed, the driver got better, faster and more stable.

So my opinion would be, the best driver would probably be the newest one. Not just for video cards, but in general, for everything.

[squeech]

I have an MSI GeForce4 Ti4400, and I get all of my driver updates from MSI's website. I used to use the ones from nVidia, but too often did I find myself rolling back to an MSI driver just to get video back! Ouch.

Plus, as ShawnD1 said, the features added in to the card like changing the clock are in the MSI driver. MSI is usually about two revisions behind the nVidia website (they're on 41.07 now).

Now, of course, this is true only for nVidia cards, IMO. I'll agree with buddha that Radeons (and ATI in general) often come out with evil drivers in their infancy. Of course, I'm pretty sure that although many companies build ATI cards, they all use the official ATI driver (in other words, no additional writing is done to them) so you can just go for the one with the latest version!

[radio1_mike]

I always use the newest NVidia drivers. IMO, I always find manufacturer's drivers to be more bloated than the reference. Unless, there's some key feature than cannot be accessed any other way, I go reference.

ps. you can always edit your registry to add overclocking to any NVidia reference set.
Google "Coolbits"

[agathodaimon]

The XFX Ti-4200 I bought came with a set of 40.72 drivers that absolutely would NOT WORK in Windows ME or Windows 2000.

So, I was using the 41.09 drivers from Nvidias website and all has been great. Although, I recently did switch to the most recent drivers (44.03) and I didn't notice any difference really... BUT it IS still stable.