12. 3D Performance: The Latest Drivers From The Manufacturer? Hardly!

When reviewing notebooks, it is our normal practice to first obtain the latest drivers from the manufacturer's website. We visited the Sony site to obtain drivers for the PCG-NVR23. Unfortunately, as is often the case with notebooks, all we found was a relatively old version (Ver. 6.13.10,3050). We therefore obtained a current driver from Nvidia (Ver. 6.14.01.4340).

There are considerable differences in these drivers - not only in the PowerMizer GUI. While the "latest" driver from the Sony website only provides PowerMizer adjustment options in battery mode, the Nvidia driver includes these options in AC mode, as well.

The Sony driverÆs PowerMizer GUI.

The latest Geforce4 Go 420 driverÆs Powermizer GUI.

Here at THG, we often wonder why so many notebook manufacturers are incapable of making reasonably up-to-date drivers available to their customers. After all, the latest drivers contribute considerably to customer satisfaction, as they contain bug fixes and often increase the performance of the graphics subsystem. Nvidia's Unified Driver Architecture for their mobile GPUs should help manufacturers to provide driver updates for their notebooks at acceptable intervals.