GeForce 7900GTX Driver Problem on Vista Ultimate 32-bit...

[Apoptosis]

Can anyone else try to confirm this problem I am having?

On my personal system with two brand new 150GB WD Raptor's in RAID 0 with a 128K Stripe size and just Vista Ultimate 32-bit installed I'm having problems updating the NVIDIA drivers for the 7900GTX graphics card...

If I remove the WDDM drivers that came with Vista Ultimate and try to install the 100.54 or 100.59 drivers, the installation fails as it can't find any compatible devices... If I put the WDDM drivers back on and then try to install the 100.54 or 100.59 drivers it detects the 7900GTX and installs fine. Not sure if this is a known issue or not, but tried it and my test bench does the same thing. Two systems and both have the same issue...

The old school of thinking is to always remove the old drivers first before installing the new ones, but on Vista that doesn't seem to be the case. Am I going crazy or has someone else with a GeForce 7 series noticed this?

[dicecca112]

Nate I believe the last drivers to support the 7X00 series was 93.71. Check the files in the drivers, one of the INI will list cards supported

[Apoptosis]

Nope, the 100.59's that are on the Web support it.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_100.59.html

The driver works with many cards, but not with 7900/7800 SLI just yet.

I realize the Web driver download page says "Graphics Driver / GeForce 8800 Series / Windows Vista xxx" in order to get this driver, but you'll see the following release notes:

# Beta driver for NVIDIA SLIâ„¢ support for GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS GPUs
# This driver supports the following features:

* Single GPU support
o DirectX 9 support for GeForce 6/7/8 series GPUs
o DirectX 10 support for GeForce 8800 GPUs
o OpenGL support for GeForce 6/7/8 series GPUs
* NVIDIA SLI support
o DirectX 9 support for GeForce 8800 GPUs
o OpenGL support for GeForce 8800 GPUs

# DirectX 9 and OpenGL NVIDIA SLI support for GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs and DirectX 10 NVIDIA SLI support for GeForce 8800 GPUs will be available in a future driver

I'm running 100.59's on a 7900GTX with no problems at all now that I figured it out.

Two problems I've noticed for older GeForce 7 series cards:

1) can't update the driver if the old one is removed
2) the warning message for when your 6-pin PCIe header is not plugged in was forgotten in the Vista drivers.

[dicecca112]

doh, I forgot this was vista. the last xp driver was 93.71

[werty316]

One reason why I am holding off on getting Vista.