NVIDIA drops the ball on Windows 8 RP driver release

[visualbuffs]

NVIDIA must already be feeling a bit red faced now that ATI managed to get their Windows 8 drivers out the door just one day after the Windows 8 Release Preview was made available for download.

Yesterday the Senior Project Manager for Consumer Software updated his blog post to inform impatient customers that the drivers were still not ready after initially promising an "early next week" release last Friday.

He wrote on the NVIDIA Software blog:

[Update] (6/6/2012): We have decided to postpone the driver release to pick up some additional fixes that we feel are necessary for a great Windows 8 experience. We apologize for the delay and will post the new driver as soon as possible.

As with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, NVIDIA customers suffered various graphic issues in games and notably in the rendering of Firefox itself and web page content. This issue seemed a little better in the Release Preview, but in Firefox there are still issues with the scrollbar which seems to break randomly and the rendering of fonts within web pages is also broken, jumping randomly between the correct rendering of fonts and not.

Another user in our forums did a little research on the problems and discovered that drivers after the 289.xx release seemed to cause more issues for various GPU's which might explain why an older driver was shipped with the RP; the latest driver for Windows 7 systems is 301.42. Windows 8 will eventually get a 302.xx driver which can't install on Windows 7 or earlier.

Come on NVIDIA sort it out!

Source: NVIDIA via Forums

[1chaoticadult]

I would rather wait a bit long for the nvidia RP driver then have them release a half-broken driver.

[mara-]

This seems to be true even for Windows 7 drivers. I updated to 301.42 and I had an issue with program Subtitle Workshop. Program crashed on every startup when trying to load video. I restored to 295.73 and everything works fine.

Cheers ;)