why does windows 8 need different drivers than windows 7?

[Tilt090]

reference https://www.neowin.net/news/nvidia-drops-the-ball-on-windows-8-rp-driver-release

plus they arent backward compatible with win7.

[Dick Montage]

Because the display driver model for Win8 (WDDM 1.2 I think) is different!? It is an improvement to the overall driver model, so suppliers need to write newer drivers...

What's the problem here?

[articuno1au]

Most of them are backwards compatible, even graphics drivers are, they just have some bugs.

Windows 8 has a requirement for WDDM1.2 driver signing for graphics, that's the only real reason you need separate drivers.

In time they will be integrated and patched up. Remember it's a preview OS.

EDIT::

DAMNIT NIK!

[x-byte]

Windows 7 may get the WDDM 1.2 update later, like Vista got with WDDM 1.1. Since Windows 8 is still "beta" Nividia will have to separate the releases.

Windows 8 includes WDDM 1.2^[23][24] and DXGI 1.2.^[25][24] New features were first previewed at the Windows BUILD conference and include performance improvements as well as support for stereoscopic 3D rendering and video playback.

Other major features include preemptive multitasking with finer granularity (DMA buffer, primitive, triangle, pixel, or instruction-level),^[26] reduced memory footprint, improved resource sharing, and faster timeout detection and recovery. 16-bit color surface formats (565, 5551, 4444) are mandatory in Windows 8, and Direct3D 11 Video supports YUV 4:4:4/4:2:2/4:2:0/4:1:1 video formats with 8, 10, and 16-bit precision, as well as 4 and 8-bit palletized formats.^[27]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model#WDDM_1.2

[xendrome]

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