May 4th, 2008
When Apple released Boot Camp 2.1, which I’ve looked at earlier, they did not deliver any driver updates. Nothing was changed beyond the Boot Camp applications and services installed on the Windows side.
Installing a newer driver provides better game and application compatibility, not to mention improved frame-rates. Stock nVidia drivers, which are available on their site, are not compatible with the 8600M GT graphics card that ships with the MacBook Pro1.
Luckily, it is possible to modify the driver installer. When Boot Camp 2.0 was released I put together a driver package based on the 169.21 unified nVidia driver. This driver has been surpassed by the more current 174.93 driver.
The drivers and modifications are available from LaptopVideo2Go, but the process of making the driver install can be tricky. Here is a ready-to-install driver package I’ve put together:
I’ve been told by a reader that upgrading to the 17x drivers resolves a number of hibernation issues. LaptopVideo2Go forum users report that stuttering and frame-rate issues with a number of games are also resolved.
UPDATE 2008.05.14
A note from reader John W. on the automated screen dimmer functionality in some of nVidia’s drivers. These might conflict with Boot Camp’s screen dimming functionality via the keyboard.
To disable nVidia’s screen dimming:
regedit in Windows’ run dialogsmartdimmerenableCommentary and drivers relate to Windows XP SP3 32bit on a Santa-Rosa MacBook Pro 15" — though the nVidia driver will work for all recent GeForce cards.↩