News NVIDIA ForceWare 65.xx driver gets WHQL certification

With recent suggestive comments appearing around the web, it would appear that NVIDIA are close to releasing a 6x.xx series ForceWare driver with WHQL certification for all NVIDIA graphics cards, this includes all graphics processors since the earliest TNT series right up to, and including the GeForce 6800 Ultra. It has been a long time coming, but there have been a number of third parties (which, consequently, are all inside Microsoft) that NVIDIA have been reliant on in order to allow them to gain WHQL certification for all of their products on the new ForceWare driver.

They were slowed down with the delay of Microsoft's DirectX 9.0c, which was supposed to be launched considerably earlier than it was. Secondly, there were more delays with the introduction of a new WHQL test kit that was a required update with the release of DirectX 9.0c, this meant that NVIDIA had to postpone their driver plans yet again.

Most of you will know that DirectX 9.0c brought Shader Model 3.0 into reality, which meant that NVIDIA had to wait for the API update before it could focus its efforts on passing all WHQL qualification tests. NVIDIA's WHQL certification is rapidly slowing down due to the fact that if one of their products fails a single test in the WHQL test kit, the drivers require a troubleshooting session that is followed by modification in order to pass the test.

Currently, there are 61.xx series ForceWare drivers available from NVIDIA's site, which do have WHQL certification for the GeForce 6800 and 6600 lines, but not for any other products - this is a reason why NVIDIA have not wanted to release new drivers to the public in an official manner.

The 65.xx ForceWare driver will also have support for Multi-GPU, or SLI as it's known, although we're not too sure as to how this is tested for WHQL certification at the moment.