NVidia abandons older graphics cards

[Tim]

It looks like NVidia's latest driver release (97.46) is incompatible with
any cards older than the 6100. I've got a 5950 and when trying to install I
get the error message "The NVidia Setup program could not locate any drivers
that are comptible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit." My
card is only 3 years old, and I'm now permanently relegated to using beta
drivers if I want to run Vista.

 

[Vicente Alvarez]

Er..... what beta drivers???? o_O
Where are those!!!... I have an old Geforce4 MX 440 and I need ***at
least*** OpenGL support. Or there isn't any way to emulate OpengGL
instructions and translate the to Direct3D for my crappy XDDM drivers for
Vista work? o_O

 

[Ray]

I had the same message, but if you get the International language, I used
the English (UK) ones, they install.

Ray

 

[Tim]

Not on my machine. I tried both the US and UK versions and got the same
message.

 

[Steve Urbach]

Not on my machine. I tried both the US and UK versions and got the same
message.

Open the INF file with Notepad.
Scroll down
You will see the list of cards it has installation
instructions for :-(

DO NOT SAVE when exiting notepad.

 

[Tim]

Thanks for the info. I got it to install by copying 2 lines of code
relating to the 5950 from the INF file for 96.85 driver and pasting it into
the INF file for 97.46. I suspect there's some reason why they don't want
this driver used with this card, but so far it's working OK. Time will
tell.

 

[Steve Urbach]

Thanks for the info. I got it to install by copying 2 lines of code
relating to the 5950 from the INF file for 96.85 driver and pasting it into
the INF file for 97.46. I suspect there's some reason why they don't want
this driver used with this card, but so far it's working OK. Time will
tell.

But you did not shell out $$ for the latest hardware ;-)

Next thing you know, Nvidia will put some sort of checksum test on the
INF file to prevent this kind of hack.

 

[Alexander Suhovey]

Tim, list of products supported by ForceWare 97.46 release doesn't have
anything earlier than 6100 so I guess you're out of luck here (unless you
manual edit INF file as I see you did from your later post):
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_97.46_supported.html

However, you can try installing latest Windows XP drivers for your card,
like this one:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_93.71.html

That's what I did on pre-release Vista builds with my old Ti 4200 AGP8x
(that was before I did a major upgrade). And it worked fine for me.

If you go that route, you may experience some compatibility problems with
installer and/or nVIDIA controls so you migh want to extract driver package
first and then update video driver using Device Manager instead.

 

[colo]

The 96.85 version nvidia Vista driver supports older cards.