GeForce and ForceWare drivers

[shought]

What's the difference between GeForce and ForceWare drivers from NVIDIA? They have different version numbers so I assume they serve a different purpose.

I've got a NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT, which would be recommended and why?

If they serve the same purpose, why do the file sizes of the installers differ that much? (ForceWare: +/- 35 MB, GeForce: +/- 82 MB)

[bearoninternet]

You got me curious. ;)

Maybe this will help.

Though it is not an answer to the differences in filesizes. But my best quess is that the geforce drivers supports more products.

I couldnt find forceware drivers on nvidia though, you got those 'out of the box' right?

Cheers.

[shought]

Nope, found them in the Beta archive ;)

[shought]

It seems that GeForce drivers are the follow up of ForceWare... And ForceWare drivers are the follow up of Detonator. Ah well, then I'll stick with my GeForce drivers.

(They started naming the drivers GeForce in middle May, for the people who are interested)

The latest driver versions for all your NVIDIA GeForce products are 175.19 WHQL*(Released July 9 2008, 36.8 MB) and 177.92 Beta(Released August 26 2008, 82.2 MB).

175.19 doesn't support the NVIDIA 200-series yet, 177.92 does, but in Beta ;) 177.92 adds support for PhysX acceleration on all 8-series, 9-series and 200-series NVIDIA GPUs(with a minimum of 256 dedicated graphics memory) and supports CUDA™.

Download 175.19 WHQL*: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_175.19_whql.html

Download 177.92 Beta: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_177.92_beta.html

* For NVIDIA drivers WHQL stands for Final.