nVidia Detonator XP Unleashes Power and Features of nVidia GPU's

NVIDIA Corporation announced today the availability of its Detonator XP unified driver for its award-winning family of 3D graphics processing units (GPU's). Detonator XP includes specific technology designed to unleash the power of the highly anticipated Windows XP operating system (www.nvidia.com/windowsxp). It also provides performance enhancements for Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows Me environments. Detonator XP is available free of charge, and can be downloaded today at www.nvidia.com.

“Our Unified Driver Architecture gives us the unique ability to give customers a free performance upgrade six months after a new GPU hits the market,” said Dan Vivoli, vice president of marketing at NVIDIA. “Detonator XP allows us to continue this tradition. And, with Detonator XP’s XPress Link technology, it unleashes new hardware and software capabilities making it the ultimate driver environment for Windows XP.”

Detonator XP contains the newly-patented Detonator XPress Link technology, utilising the patented Direct Memory Access (DMA) found on all NVIDIA hardware, while Detonator Xpress Link provides a direct connection from the hardware to the operating system. As a result, Detonator XPress Link assists in accelerating the new optimisations made in the I/O Subsystem and Memory Management portions of Windows XP’s core. With Detonator XPress Link technology, NVIDIA is able to deliver the fastest 3D graphics performance on all Windows XP platforms.

Detonator XP also features a complete OpenGL 1.3 ICD with NVIDIA extensions – allowing developers to create content that fully exposes the hardware features of NVIDIA’s GPU's. Detonator XP also includes custom DirectX pipelines specifically designed to fully accelerate Windows XP and all other operating systems. By way of these new enhancements, Detonator XP delivers up to a 50% performance gain in Microsoft DirectX and SGI OpenGL applications.

Detonator XP supports the entire TNT2, GeForce, GeForce2, Quadro, Quadro2, Quadro DCC and GeForce3 families of GPU's and is based on NVIDIA’s patented Unified Driver Architecture (UDA). Through UDA, NVIDIA’s software drivers are compatible with past, present and future NVIDIA GPU's, and are top-to-bottom compatible with all currently manufactured versions of NVIDIA’s GPU's.