not sure about inside but the page with the download had a link to the release notes

Sounds like something worthwhile to add to VOGONS Drivers.

Davros wrote:

not sure about inside but the page with the download had a link to the release notes

And that's the thing, it's very inconsistent. For some drivers there is a massive PDF document with lots of detail. Others you find a short lost of what has been fixed. But most drivers have zero information.

collector wrote:

Sounds like something worthwhile to add to VOGONS Drivers.

Yes it does. I found most links on Nvidia's archive time out and don't work. There are other sites that have great archives though.

Thing is I don't think that archiving every single driver is necessary. But definitely all the major drivers. But without knowing what has been fixed it becomes quite difficult.

At least for Splinter Cell and Pandora Tomorrow I found drivers with references to these games.

If I remember right, the driver releases should be considered cumulative to an extent - so if something is fixed in say, 10.10, it shouldn't be a problem in 10.11 (it was already fixed). Some drivers fix more things than others, which I've noticed usually coincides with a lot of popular game releases. Stuff requiring a specific revision of drivers should be more a fault of the game developer than the OEM (their optimization shouldn't be that extreme).

With nVidia drivers, ime, usually the first in a "range" has the largest support document and the minor revisions tend to only list whatever specific issue/problem they're meaning to address. AMD tends to have broader release notes if you download them separately (sometimes requires a bit of digging on their website).

I think it would be easier/more logical to identify specific games that have a problem and require a specific revision of driver, and then list what driver they specifically want - most games (IME) tend to follow the same model of "newest is best" for driver releases.

Each new release can have regressions. In any case, the idea is to have access to the release notes, which can be useful when researching solutions to problems.

obobskivich wrote:

I think it would be easier/more logical to identify specific games that have a problem and require a specific revision of driver, and then list what driver they specifically want - most games (IME) tend to follow the same model of "newest is best" for driver releases.

That would be great, but also very time consuming 😀

A collection or time-line of drivers + fixes + known issues would be a great start. You could search for keywords like "display scaling" or "Splinter Cell" and several results would come back.

Would Vogons be a good place to host this? Or is something else more suitable like Google Docs?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Would Vogons be a good place to host this? Or is something else more suitable like Google Docs?

Sounds just like what VOGONS Drivers was made for.

The NVidia ftp site isn't browseable anymore, but direct links seem to still work. You can see a mirror of the directory contents here:

http://www.scopr.com/ftpsites/download.nvidia … dows/index.html

NV posted the PDF release notes for most releases of older Detonator & Forceware drivers in the same directory.

Nice find! I will try to back them all up.

It seems only a few drivers have release notes. So the nest best thing to do is making sure the month and year is recorded. Then it's quite easy to match up a game with a driver 😀

Perhaps the release notes info should be added to VOGONS drivers before they disappear.