A reader recently contacted us asking about 3DMarkVantage and NVIDIA WHQL drivers for his GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB. He told us that he wanted to run 3DMarkVantage with WHQL drivers, because he did not want to run teh etst with beta drivers and described NVIDIA’s latest WHQL drivers as "old dinos".

We did some research and found that the most recent WHQL drivers for the GeForce 6/7/8 series of cards in fact are a bit dated and were released back on December 19 and 20 of last year 2007. As of today, these are the current drivers offered by NVIDIA :

GeForce 6/7/8 Series
32-bit Windows XP : ForceWare Release 169.21, December 19, 2007
32-bit Windows Vista : ForceWare Release 169.25, December 20, 2007
64-bit Windows XP : ForceWare Release 169.21, December 19, 2007
64-bit Windows Vista : ForceWare Release 169.25, December 20, 2007

GeForce 9 Series
32-bit Windows XP : GeForce Release 174.74, April 1st, 2008
32-bit Windows Vista : GeForce Release 174.74, April 1st, 2008
64-bit Windows XP : GeForce Release 174.74, April 1st, 2008
64-bit Windows Vista : GeForce Release 174.74, April 1st, 2008

The 6/7/8 series are in fact already 18 weeks old, which is quite substantial in this industry segment, especially if you consider that ATI releases new driver packages each month.

However, NVIDIA told us that new drivers are on the way : NVIDIA’s Chris Daniel told us that "the drivers are going through WHQL as we speak. ETA is sometime next week."

NVIDIA seriously dropped the ball here, but the situation is getting fixed. We wonder why NVIDIA does not step up to the table and offer monthly or at least quarterly driver updates for its products.