More features

Mouse over pop-ups/TV

If you’re new to driver tweaking, or just don’t understand what a particular setting does, NVIDIA now provides mouse over pop-up descriptions. Simply scroll over the setting you’d like more information on and a description of that setting will popup. Don’t expect a thesis on any of the settings however (and descriptions aren’t available on all of them), the pop-ups are mainly focused on telling you what will happen as a result, so you will want to refer to the documentation NVIDIA provides with each driver release for detailed descriptions.

Popup help description

For those of you who have televisions hooked up to your computer, the new driver also offers a Play on my TV setting to quickly launch videos on your television. Simply right click on the file you’d like to watch and select “Play on my TV”.

nView Desktop Manager menu

Kill those popups here

nView 3.5

Two new features first introduced in nView 3.0 have now been enhanced in nView 3.5: blocking of internet pop-up ads and gridlines.

Popup prevention settings menu

Here you can tweak which sites to block

If you recall, nView was the first graphics driver to automatically disable pop-up internet advertisements. In nView 3.5 you can preview the pop-up before it opens, or if you’d like, you can set it up to play a sound or change the mouse cursor when a pop-up is blocked. Under the Popup Prevention Settings Menu you can also add exceptions to the pop-up list, say for instance you don’t want to block the pop-ups at espn.com, just add that address under the “allow” menu, while inside the history menu you can see all the pop-ups the driver has blocked.

Blocked these popups easily

Setup was a snap, everything you need is found under the “Applications” tab in the nView desktop manager. Then select enhancements to see the application enhancements NVIDIA has provided for Internet Explorer (which is the only browser currently supported) and Microsoft Office.

Grid lines

First featured in our ForceWare 52.16 driver report, NVIDIA’s grid lines are once again back in ForceWare 56.56. Grid lines works by separating your desktop’s real estate into grid regions that you define, which is helpful when multitasking. If you have four applications running on your desktop right now, grid lines can be used to organize them to run in certain areas of your desktop.

See how the apps fit in my gridlines?

Grid lines numbered

For our example, we setup a grid line with four regions. One thin, long region for instant messaging clients like ICQ or AIM (on the left side of the screen, region 1 in our screenshot), a much broader area at the top of the screen (region 2), and then divided the lower portion of the desktop into two smaller regions (regions 3 and 4).

Here is how it looks on your desktop

Now, with grid lines enabled, we can run these applications within the regions we’ve predefined. When you want to focus on one application, you can maximize it to take up the entire desktop, then if you’d like to multitask you can maximize it to the grid region you’ve predefined.

If the application is automatically sent to the wrong grid region, simply grab it and drag it to the region you’d like it to be in. It will drop right in that area without the need for any resizing! This is definitely one of nView’s handiest features.

Bug report

Unfortunately, ForceWare 56.56 does little to resolve the most popular outstanding issues in its predecessor. For instance, shadow buffer lighting mode still doesn’t work properly with DX8 and up cards in Splinter Cell. This is supposed to be one of the key advantages to owning an NVIDIA card, as the shadow buffer mode looks better than projector. This feature hasn’t worked since Detonator 45.23.

We provided some screenshots of this in our 52.16 driver report if you’d like to see some examples.

Also, NVIDIA’s image sharpening bug persists with this driver. With this bug, text appears thinner, making it difficult to read.