Drivers for Nvidia Optimus / GT 525M

Question

Hi, When I got my XPS 15z, I installed whatever the latest Nvidia drivers were (280.x?), and I also recently installed the Battlefield 3 beta drivers (285.x?), these both seemed like they were running fine. I've been having issues with VMware where it doesn't seem like there's any video acceleration being passed into my guest systems (ie. Aero not running in a Win7 VM when apparently it should in VMware), I read that this could be an issue with having too recent drivers, so tried to roll back to the Dell supplied drivers and this is where my real issues have started. I uninstalled both the Intel HD and Nvidia drivers, intending to install the latest of both from the Dell drivers & downloads page, after installing the Intel drivers and restarting my computer, the Nvidia card is nowhere to be seen in Device Manager. I've tried installing the Dell supplied Nvidia drivers and both of the driver versions mentioned earlier, but with all of them I can't get past the first stage, it says it can't find any compatible hardware. I've even tried reinstalling the Intel HD drivers that were on the laptop HDD in C:\Drivers. I've also tried reinstalling all of the Dell provided drivers for all the hardware, but nothing I do seems to detect the Nvidia card anymore. Is there a simple enough fix that I'm missing here? Need to install certain things in the right order? Or have I permanently damaged the Nvidia card in some way that simple software installs and updates aren't going to be able to fix? Any help is hugely appreciated!Ben.

speedstep · Answer

Virtual Machines Do not have hardware Acceleration.  Thats not correct.  VMWARE is not a gaming platform.VMWARE Virtual Machines do not  support OpenGL Hardware Acceleration.

bkbooth · Answer

Thanks for the reply. Firstly, I'm not totally sure on everything to do with virtualisation, I'm fairly new to it so excuse me if I'm saying something incorrect. VMware does support Aero in Windows 7 though through hardware virtualisation (kb.vmware.com/.../search.do) and it isn't working in my VM, I may be incorrect about drivers being the issue, but there's no reason why my hardware setup shouldn't support virtualising the video hardware so that Aero would work. VMware player does in fact support OpenGL 2.1 acceleration (it's on the release notes). I am definitely not trying to play games in the VM (why would I when I have a perfectly good Windows 7 host?) I'm setting up the Win7 guest as a development environment so ultimately I don't care if Aero doesn't work, but the fact that it's not working seems to indicate that the VM isnt' working optimally. My next issue with VMware is Ubuntu, I can't see any good reason why the Unity UI shouldn't work with hardware virtualisation, but it doesn't and virtualisation is my only option because there's no good Linux support for Nvidia Optimus.

I would like the VMware issues resolved, but they're definitely secondary issues at the moment considering I can't get my Windows 7 host instance to recognise the installed Nvidia card at all. Any feedback on the main issue would be hugely appreciated.

DELL-Terry B · Answer

The video drivers may have been corrupted. I really don't know if the Battlefield 3 beta drivers are supported with Optimus on this system.

I suggest downloading the latest drivers available from Support.dell.com

Nvidia

Intel

Just save them to the desktop, don't install them yet.

Then go into Programs and Features and uninstall the current Intel and Nvidia drivers, restart the system.

Once back up install the downloaded drivers, and report back here if the Nvidia GPU is detected by the install program of the Nvidia drivers and if everything is working alright.

TB

bkbooth · Answer

Thanks for the reply Terry.

Unfortunately what you're suggesting is the same steps I took when originally trying to revert back to the Dell drivers from the BF3 drivers. Note that the Nvidia GPU was there and appeared to be working fine when I had the BF3 drivers because I had good performance in games, certainly much better than if I was just using the Intel GPU. I tried the same steps several times, each time the Dell provided Intel drivers would install fine, but the Dell provided Nvidia drivers (or any Nvidia drivers) would not install because it wouldn't get past the first stage of checking that there was a compatible GPU.

Thankfully this is a fairly new laptop and I was able to backup anything important and I just ended up getting impatient and doing a System Restore 2 nights ago, the drivers and everything appear to be working fine after the System Restore.

Thanks again for your help.

Ben.

Tim_Lee · Answer

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DELL-Terry B · Answer

Absolutely Bkbooth thanks for the update.

Cleaning out corrupted drivers from the Windows registry can be really difficult. Sometimes reimaging the system is the fastest way to resolve an issue like this. I am just happy that the system is now seeing the Nvidia GPU, and the notebook is working correctly.

TB

ejn63 · Answer

There are no drivers for any Optimus chips for Windows XP.  nVidia supports only Windows Vista and Windows 7.

I2SAmigos · Answer

nVidia GeForce GT 525M For windows XPPlease Help me ! i have laptop Dell N5110 and operating system windows XP SP3i can't find the driver for my nVidia GeForce GT 525Mplease i need it, someone have a idea ?

I2SAmigos · Answer

Thank for your answer I know and i think it is not good from nvidia to do this. i search to do the update the driver with file *.inf ? (i realised it with ATI graphique carte before)

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