NVIDIA Releases Drivers for Windows 7 RC1

Coinciding with the release of Windows 7 release candidate 1 (today for MSDN and Technet subscribers and on the 5th for the laymen), NVIDIA has released drivers for the OS. The package comes in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors The tech-heads over at Anandtech declare version 185.81 “much more polished” than 185.71, released for the first beta version of Windows 7.

Why is this development important? Well, anyone wanting to run their NVIDIA graphics cards properly on Windows 7 will obviously need this. Which cards are supported? Let’s take a look at the release notes (a more detailed version is available here):

This is a beta driver supporting GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, and 200-series desktop GPUs. This driver package installs WDDM v1.1 for GeForce 8, 9, and 200-series (DirectX 10) GPUs and WDDM v1.0 for GeForce 6 and 7-series (DirectX 9) GPUs.

This driver supports all of the new Windows 7 GPU-accelerated DirectX APIs: DirectX Compute, Direct2D, DirectWrite, and DXVA-HD.

Download GeForce Driver Release 185.81: 32-bit and 64-bit versions