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Nvidia 56.56 Drivers - It's not just about games anymore

One thing that is undeniable about Nvidia is that they are a forward thinking company. They were the first to introduce 32 bit color rendering, the first to introduce a hardware T&L Engine and the first to introduce an unified driver system for nearly their entire line of cards. One of Nvidia's smartest and most successful decisions in the beginning was targeting the OEM sector of the market which started at an early stage with the RIVA128 and TNT series of cards. The RIVA128 offered great D3D performance at the time and the TNT series had an appealing feature set which really helped distinguish itself from its main competitor in terms of performance, 3dfx. It is of course, in performance 3D Graphics that Nvidia has really made a name for themselves but unfortunately the big money is not at the enthusiast/retail level but at the system integrator/OEM level as 3dfx found out too late.

The 56.56 Drivers

The current generation of cards are about done in terms of performance gains - in the last couple revisions of both the Forceware drivers from Nvidia and the Catalysts from ATI, the focus was more on bug fixes than on performance. However this does not mean that there are no major changes in the 56.56 drivers, on the contrary, they mark a significant improvement not in terms of 3D performance but in desktop features and usability.

Major Changes Include

• Application / Game Profiles
• PCI Express Support
• Nview 3.5
• Play on my TV