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Sunday, 9 November 2008

Nvidia's vanishing mirrors

Whilst trying to get better performance from ABC iView I took the oft-recommended step of upgrading my video drivers. Not only did this not improve the situation, but it made matters much worse.

For many months I've been happily trundling along with Nvidia Forceware 163.75 on my Geforce 7600GT. I upgraded this to 178.24, but found iView no better. Surprisingly, I also discovered that the configuration to "Modify Full-Screen Video Options", which I had set to "When watching video content... Also show it full-screen on my: TV" was missing. After checking various forums, it seems this is a deliberate move by Nvidia, and that the option will not be returning.

Luckily, it's easy to revert to an older version of the drivers, so I downgraded to 169.21, and found the full-screen mirroring back in place. It's not obvious from Nvidia's version history when the full-screen mirroring was removed - presumably they aren't going to proudly announce its removal, so all I know is that was removed after 169.21 and on or before 178.24.

The 7600GT is a relatively old model for which new drivers rarely provide any benefit. So, being stuck on an older driver is not a problem. Conversely, newer cards are only supported by newer drivers, so if their owners want full-screen mirroring they are out of luck. Apparently ATI still has this option, so it'll be interesting to see if Nvidia notices that it's at a competitive disadvantage.

Updated 28 Jan 2009: After reinstalling XP I was given 178.x drivers by Windows Update. To get my mirroring back I tried 175.19 (which had the mirror option), but couldn't get TV out to work at all (from forum posts it seems I am not alone). The prior recommended release from the Nvidia site, 175.16, also had broken TV out. I ended up back at my old favourite, 169.21, with mirroring and TV out both working.

While investigating this I found that the removal of the video mirroring was mentioned on the Nvidia support site and in the 178 release notes:
Removed Full‐screen video mirror controls from the NVIDIA Control Panel.