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Old April 11th 13, 08:13 PM posted to alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia
Paul
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Posts: 13,364
Default NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 Win 7 Update?

wrote:
On Thu, 11 Apr 2013 01:12:56 -0400, Paul wrote:

wrote:
On Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:56:33 -0400, Paul wrote:
wrote:
I have the Nvidia GeForce GT 640 Video Card and I received an update
notice for the device in Win7. I see people have problems with some
card updates and am wondering if I need/should update Win7 with this
one, and what happens if I do not. The update is "NVIDIA Corporation
- Audio Device, Other hardware - NVIDIA High Definition Audio Download
size: 3.9 MB". Anyone has applied this update and care to share
experience?

This is on a Dell Desktop computer.

Thanks for any insights.
charliec
That sounds like audio-over-HDMI.

Does your computer monitor have speakers ? Are you connected
over HDMI ?

The capability might not be of much use to you, if you're not
connected that way. My audio goes to my analog computer speakers,
so that Nvidia update wouldn't do anything for me.

As a general recommendation, don't take hardware drivers from
Windows Update.

If you're having an actual problem with your Nvidia product,
you can go straight to the Nvidia.com web site, and try another
driver from there.

A typical reason for updating a video driver, might be to improve
game compatibility, get better frame rate performance.

You can roll back a driver, from Device Manager (one level of rollback
is supported, not an infinite number of levels). I prefer to just
keep copies of all the ones I've used, and uninstall the old one,
then install whatever version I want to try. When you uninstall
the video driver, the default system VESA driver is used in its place
(so you can continue to see the screen). So even when you don't
have a video driver installed, there is actually a video driver
being used, a fallback driver. The fallback driver is written
by Microsoft.

Paul
Paul,

Thanks so much for your reply and insights! Yes, I have speakers, but
just normal speakers attached to my computer. I'm not sure what HDMI
is and what it provides? I do not do a lot of gaming, etc, so,
probably do not have a need for the update. But, wanted to check to
get some insights. I think I will just leave it alone as it is an
Optional update.

Thanks again
charliec

There are cables running from your computer to the LCD monitor.

The cables follow various standards, and the connector on the end of
the cable helps you figure out what you're using.

From the past, we used VGA, which is an analog method of transmitting
a video signal to the monitor.

(Analog signals are continuously variable, and paint the colors on the screen.)

http://www.tek.com/sites/tek.com/fil...copes-18-N.jpg

Now, there's also DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort, which are digital transmission
methods. A series of 1's and 0's go streaming down the thin cable, to
the monitor. The monitor gathers up those 1's and 0's to define
the color of a pixel. RGB = 10110001 01101110 00010110 would take
24 bits coming down the cable. The data would be sent, effectively,
as 8 bits in series, carried on three virtual wires. When you have
enough to paint a pixel, that can be stored somewhere in the monitor,
in preparation for displaying the entire frame. The cables run at
extremely high rates, because there can be a lot of pixels to paint,
and a lot of frames of them, all unique, per second.

Now, in the case of HDMI, they made room for both video and audio data.
That means, most of the time, the cable is carrying video. But there
is a break in the pattern (of some sort), to carry audio. If the
monitor (or TV set) has speakers, then audio-over-HDMI allows the
sounds of your computer session, to come out from the sides of the
monitor. For realism. And HDMI has enough room for audio, that they
can do many channel (for movie playback).

The main advantage of something like audio-over-HDMI, is there is only
the one thin cable running to the "display+speakers".

HDMI was probably meant for situations like a DVD player being
connected to a home theatre, in which case again, multi-channel
audio accompanying the video signal, cuts down on the cable clutter.

Some day, there will be practical wireless solutions for that,
but they're still not that common. There have been some attempts,
to send the HDMI signal over wireless, but the data has to be
compressed to make that possible at the moment. A tech for
doing that transmission wirelessly, is UWB or UltraWideBand.
So some day, there might not be any wire clutter at all.

Paul


Thanks, do you happen to have pictures of the wiring you are speaking
of that are running from the computer to the monitor so I can compare
and see which I have? Just wondering

charliec


I don't use HDMI, just VGA at the moment. That's all my monitor
has. The other monitor (on the backup computer) is VGA as well.
Quite atypical, to have two monitors with only analog input methods.
Normally, a cheap monitor has digital input, whereas my $100 monitor
was still the VGA kind.

You can get pictures of all those, on Wikipedia. These are in
roughly chronological order, and you can see the size dropping
with each one.

VGA - 15 pins
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi.../Vga-cable.jpg

DVI. The second picture shows the variations.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi.../Dvi-cable.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ctor_Types.svg

HDMI
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...-Connector.jpg

DisplayPort
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...port-cable.jpg

The DisplayPort one, may have been motivated by a wish to avoid
licensing fees, so in some ways it's not that much different
than HDMI.

Paul