Driver notification message

Serengeti (Rhino WIP)
1

The notifications panel regarding updates recommended to the video drivers is less than helpful.

Ive just updated my nvidea drivers (because nvidea sent me a message saying there was a new release) and still the notifications panel recommends I update the driver.

Rather, wouldn’t it be more helpful if the panel said something like " Your video driver is (X) days old - we recommend checking for new drivers monthly" or something similar?

What would also be even more helpful if there was the name of the driver (which rhino already knows), and a link to the driver update site…?

just sayin

cheers

2

Thanks, I’ve added RH-73552 Notification for Display Driver update needs tune-up

3

This whole system was a dream that we thought might be useful, I’m leaning toward dismantling it completely. The trouble is that there’s no standard way that video drivers tell you their born-on-date. So, we had some hackery in place that worked for most of the common drivers at the time. My guess is that our code doesn’t handle your drivers. What are they?

4

The video card is a Nvidia P3200.

Rhino knows this, and the driver date, because I can see it in the system information.

But in terms of prompting the user to update, who cares what the actual card is?

Why don’t you just look at the date ex the system info and tell the user:

‘The video card on this machine has not been updated for (x) days.

We recommend always using the latest drivers’

Or some such wording; that info is far more useful than the current non-event.

Or even, why not just do the math for the user in the system info dialog ?

So this would read something like:

Primary OpenGL: blah blah, Driver date: 0-0-0000 (M-D-Y) - 45 days ago.

Then you could remove the notification as you suggest, and we’d still have a reminder in the system info that it might be an idea to refresh the drivers.

Cheers

5

I wondered about this when I went to update drivers on my k2100m laptop and found they did not have any newer than I already have, though they are from 2021. Haven’t run rhino 8 on that machine, so don’t know if it would give me a warning for this, but unless you have reliable data both on the date of my installed driver, and the date of the most recent available (and they are different for Standard vs. DCH, even ignoring beta/new feature releases), it seems it could be a pretty difficult trick to pull off.

6

Can you please post that section of your SystemInfo? It’s true that you can perceive a date in there, but it’s just a big wad of text that we have to parse into something meaningful for the warning message. I think if we can’t parse anything meaningful, we assume that the driver is out of date. So yeah, we could move the warning here - but the same imperfect code that gives you a warning now will probably give you the wrong info in SystemInfo.

I logged this project as RH-73741

It does, indeed.

7

Windows 11 (10.0.22621 SR0.0) or greater (Physical RAM: 32Gb)

Computer platform: LAPTOP - Plugged in [100% battery remaining]

Hybrid graphics configuration.
Primary display: Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630 (Intel) Memory: 1GB, Driver date: 1-20-2022 (M-D-Y).
> Integrated graphics device with 3 adapter port(s)
- Windows Main Display is laptop’s integrated screen or built-in port
Primary OpenGL: NVIDIA Quadro P3200 (NVidia) Memory: 6GB, Driver date: 2-2-2023 (M-D-Y). OpenGL Ver: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 528.49
> Integrated accelerated graphics device with 4 adapter port(s)
- Video pass-through to primary display device

I don’t really understand why this is so difficult - As you will know this information is always available from the windows system itself (Device manager / display adaptors / NVIDIA Quadro P3200 / driver date, version etc.)
Why isn’t it just a case of asking windows, and dropping the info into the rhino system dialog?

(It would be sufficient to tell me I know nothing, and its too complex to fit into my brain…)

cheers
rabbit