New nForce drivers reveal NV18/NV28 names

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Last week a regular browser of NVIDIA website/FTP has discovered 1.12 nForce drivers on nVidia's FTP. The drivers have not been officially released and have been pulled from NVIDIA's FTP the next day or the day after.

Officially, the latest nForce drivers are 1.05 and they contain 28.32 vga drivers. In comparison 1.12 drivers contain 31.00 drivers. The original file did not support any other cards then nForce gpu but they have been modified to support all cards later on by guru3d (through editing the .inf file).

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Upon the examination of 31.00 drivers, it was discovered that these drivers reveal the names of upcoming NV18/28 cards from NVIDIA.

The latest official drivers - 30.82 - list the upcoming cards as NV18/NV18GL and NV28/NV28GL BUT the new 31.00 drivers refer to them by their name:

NV18.1 is now listed as GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X NV18.2 is now listed as GeForce4 MX 440SE with AGP8X NV18.3 is now listed as GeForce4 MX 420 with AGP8X

NV18GL.1 is now listed as Quadro4 580 XGL NV18GL.2 is now listed as Quadro4 280 NVS NV18GL.3 is now listed as Quadro4 380 XGL

NV28.1 is now listed as GeForce4 Ti 4600 with AGP8X NV28.2 is now listed as GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP8X

NV28GL.1 is now listed as Quadro4 980 XGL NV28GL.2 is now listed as Quadro4 780 XGL

Thing to note from this would be that GeForce4 Ti 4400 with AGP8X is missing - and all the drivers before 31.00 only listed two NV28 cards so this would mean TI4400 with AGP 8x will not be introduced. I wonder why...

Another interesting thing is that GeForce4 MX 460 with AGP8X is missing and instead we have a MX 440SE (Special Edition?) card listed. I wonder what's behind this strategy.

A final thing I noticed was that the mysterious Nv01F0 (NVIDIA 0x01F0) is now listed as GeForce4 MX Integrated GPU - so that's for the nForce2 motherboard which is yet to hit the stores.