Nvidia Forceware Tweak Guide


Author: Koroush Ghazi

Last Modified: July 2010

Printable Version: Printing Guides



Introduction


Nvidia has gone through a rollercoaster ride over the last few years. There was a time when Nvidia was the undisputed king of graphics card chipset makers. If you were a serious gamer you had an Nvidia graphics card in your system, and that was that. The Nvidia Detonator driver package was known for its stability and functionality, and was considered far better than anything offered by ATI. Then along came ATI's Radeon series of graphics cards, in particular the Radeon 9700 Pro, and a revamping of the ATI Catalyst driver package - all of a sudden Nvidia's reign was shakey to say the least.


Over time Nvidia regained a lot of the ground it lost to ATI, and Nvidia graphics cards are once again considered to have excellent 'bang for the buck'. Nvidia is also making great strides in the development and use of new graphics technology such as SLI, CUDA and PhysX. To match these hardware developments, the Nvidia Forceware drivers remain an excellent driver set packed with features such as per-game profiles, Ambient Occlusion and user-controlled power management to help you get more out of your Nvidia graphics card.


This Nvidia Forceware Tweak Guide covers the optimization of the Forceware drivers from start to finish. Everything from correct driver installation and setup and how to clean your machine of older drivers and devices, through to clear descriptions of all the Forceware Control Panel settings, how to enable and use advanced tweaks, as well as initial advice about overclocking. All this in one handy reference source for Nvidia graphics card users.


Note that I have contacted Nvidia to ask them for assistance in keeping this guide up to date. Surprisingly I've never received any response to date despite the prominence of this guide. As with ATI and their lack of support for the ATI Catalyst Tweak Guide, I would suggest the lack of support is because I don't clearly favor Nvidia over ATI (or vice versa). It's a shame they can't see past their commercial interests and help in providing better customer support - the lack of Nvidia technical support makes updating this guide for new hardware and related features much more difficult, but I would much rather do things the hard way than write biased articles.




Note: This guide refers to the latest Official Nvidia Forceware drivers Version 258.96. Make sure to check back regularly as the guide is updated for each new Forceware release, including features found in newer Beta Forceware versions.