Official Driver Supporting GTX 970 and up found

[had to correct this, the "listdevices.txt" was misleading, only exactly ONE driver supports GTX 970 and GTX 980. Other GTX 9x0 / Titans were mentioned in later drivers, but were not in the inf files.]

Interesting find while explicitely searching for drivers older than those on the NVidia-Site, but after the launch, on www.forum-3dcenter.org

http://uk.download.nvidia.com/Windows/344.11/344.11-desktop-winxp-32bit-international.exe

More infos:

https://www.forum-3dcenter.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=556959

I tried it, and my GTX 970 was detected and runs fine (no SLI, though, even though it is active, and detected on W10 64bit).

Excerpt from ListDevices.txt:
 

Quote

UDA Package name: GeforceWeb Public International

nv4_disp.inf:
    DEV_06C0 "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480"
    [...]
    DEV_1380 "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti"
    DEV_1381 "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750"
    DEV_1382 "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 745"
    DEV_13C0 "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980"
    DEV_13C2 "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970"

 

NVidia mostly lists drivers AFTER this one on their site (there may be one or two more inbetween containing the 970+, but i did not detect any more. Jaclaz?).

Oh, and one further insight:

There exist inf-files for OEM cards (i.e. nvmii.inf for MSI) that indicate later drivers (347.25, 347.88) support these cards as well, as long as they are from said OEM.

(look i.e. here: https://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/30969-modding-nvidia-oem-inf-files/ )

Using these may be possible, but as these may have other settings (assuming OC, requiring better cooler, etc.), it is always a bit risky.

If they can be used for your card without inf-modding, you just pinpointed a driver tailor-made for your card, congrats...

Starting with version 350.xx, 970+ are neither mentioned in the listdevices.txt, nor in inf-files.

I suspect, this has something to do with XP 32bit dropping out of support with Microsoft on April the 8th 2014, so NVidia possibly joined the bandwaggon here... or was "encouraged" to do so by Microsoft, and only OEMs that were complied to deliver drivers for a certain time got some support. But thats just guesswork...

For modding inf-files to have 970+ GPUs use the GTX 960 drivers, which seems to be working well, search on MSFN (maybe later i'll link to those threads - give me some time...).

According to an analysis of the later drivers, of which the 368.91 (iCafe) seems to be the latest, while 368.81 is the latest generic, remember, that there exists more than one GTX 960, so choose well:

NVIDIA_DEV.1401 = "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960"
NVIDIA_DEV.1406 = "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960"