YESTERDAY NVIDIA RELEASED the 196.21 WHQL drivers for its graphics cards that add SLI support to several recent games – as well as some old ones – and bring a new version of the PhysX drivers along for the ride. However, it also killed most overclocking utilities at the same time.
It’s not clear what is going on, but Expreview has tested with RivaTuner 2.24C, EVGA Precision 1.9.0, Galaxy MagicPanel HD and MSI AfteBurner 1.5.0 Beta 5. Of the four utilities only MSI’s AfterBurner utility would let them overclock their test card. We can add Gigabyte’s Gamer HUD to the list of applications that stopped working after the driver update.
Some of the utilities are still displaying the clock speeds of the cards, but most of them are just displaying zeros. GPU-Z is still detecting the clock speed of the cards correctly, which leaves us to think that this has been done on purpose by Nvidia, although as we can’t verify if this is the case on any other operating system than Windows 7 64-bit we can’t draw any conclusions at this time.
Expreview is drawing some wild conclusion that its related to Nvidia’s impeding launch of Fermi based cards and as such they want to prevent the cards from being overclocked. This seems like a little bit of a long shot, especially as the drivers are WHQL certified for use with the current crop of cards. Hopefully Nvidia will sort out this issue as we can imagine that quite a few people will be miffed about it, least not the competitive overlocking crowd.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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