A note about NVIDIA drivers (on windows) an glCapsViewer

Thanks to Christophe Riccio, it came to my attention that most NVIDIA driver reports on windows are discarded when trying to upload them to my OpenGL hardware database.

The cause for that is pretty simple : Contrary to the other vendors, NVIDIA does not include their (or any, e.g. OpenGL ICD) driver version inside the GL_VERSION string on windows (at least not on Windows Vista and up, on XP this still seems to be the case). So the database doesn’t see reports generated with more recent driver version as new ones, discarding them though even they may be never and contain new extensions and features.

Christophe already reported this to NVIDIA and I hope they change this for the future, and get this in line with their GL_VERSION strings on Mac OSX and Linux. Until then I’m trying to release a glCapsViewer version for windows that’ll get the driver version from WMI (which isn’t that easy for systems with multiple GPUs) and add it to the GL_VERSION string like on the other operating systems, so that reports with newer driver versions won’t get discarded.

So if you’re on windows and own an NVIDIA GPU, don’t worry if your reports get discarded even after installing the most recent drivers. I’m aware of this and I’m trying to fix it until NVIDIA adds the driver versions to the GL_VERSION string again.