Driver Update: Nvidia Geforce 177.89 beta

The development department of Nvidia has during Signgraph 2008 released a new set of beta drivers for its Geforce video cards, adding preliminary support for Opengl 3.0. To activate this support, you will need to install the program in addition to the drivers themselves nvemulate have to install. The version number has arrived at 177.89 beta and features the following announcement:

Driver 177.89 – Open GL 3.0 – Siggraph 2008

The Windows 177.89 Drivers available via the links below, released during Siggraph 2008, enable the latest features including OpenGL 3.0 support. This special page allows direct access to the new drivers for Siggraph attendees — the drivers will become part of the standard release NVIDIA Graphics drivers in the days immediately following. To enable/disable OpenGL 3.0 features, please use the latest nvemulate tools.

OpenGL 3.0 beta driver release notes

This driver is aimed at developers to start coding to the new OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.30 features. These features are not enabled by default. They can be enabled using the nvemulate utility.

You need one of the following graphics cards to enable the OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.30 functionality.

Desktop: GeForce 8000 series or higher; GeForce GTX 260, 280; Quadro FX 370, 570, 1700, 3700, 4600, 4700×2, 5600
Notebook: GeForce 8000 series or higher; Quadro FX 360M, 370M, 570M, 770M, 1600M, 1700M, 2700M, 3600M, 3700M

This driver implements all of GLSL 1.30 and all of OpenGL 3.0, except for the following functionality:

• One-channel (RED) and two-channel (RG) textures
• Mixed size FBO attachments (mixed-format attachments are supported)
• The Clearbuffer API
• Windowless rendering support (We suggest you use GPU affinity instead)
• Forward compatible context
• DebugContext

This driver exposes the following new extensions:

OpenGL 2.1 extensions:

• ARB_vertex_array_object
• ARB_framebuffer_objectARB_half_float_vertex

OpenGL 3.0 extensions:

• WGL_create_context
• ARB_draw_instanced
• ARB_geometry_shader4
• ARB_texture_buffer_object
• WGL_create_context

The OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.30 specifications can be downloaded here. For any bugs or issues, please file a bug through the developer web site.[break]The driver is available in the following flavours:
Nvidia Geforce 177.89 – Windows XP 32-bit
Nvidia Geforce 177.89 – Windows XP 64 bit
Nvidia Geforce 177.89 – Windows Vista 32-bit
Nvidia Geforce 177.89 – Windows Vista 64-bit