This archive features ‘beta’ reference drivers for the Rendition V2x00 family of graphics accelerators. These drivers are not supported by Rendition, Micron Technology Inc, or by your board manufacturer. They are provided as a courtesy to users of Rendition based products on an "as is" basis, without warranty. They may not be disassembled, reverse-engineered, or used on anything other than Rendition chipsets. Use these drivers at your own risk.
What are reference drivers?
Reference drivers are provided by Rendition to our chip customers; who then use these drivers as a starting point in creating their own supported release drivers. In the process of creating these supported drivers, a board maker typically debugs and optimizes the reference drivers to suite the exact configuration of the boards they have sold. It is important to remember that Rendition manufactures chips, not board. We have no way to guarantee that these reference drivers will run on your exact board configuration. If you have difficulty, you may need to consult with your original board maker.
Why would I want reference drivers?
You are often better off with the supported drivers provided by your board manufacturer. These drivers have been thoroughly tested and optimized on your specific hardware configuration, and are backed by a dedicated support staff. But occasionally new release drivers lag the reference drivers by several months. If an application or game you wish to run requires certain features or bug fixes that have not been incorporated into the release drivers yet, your only solution may be to use these reference drivers.
You should switch back to the supported release drivers from your board manufacturer as soon as they have been brought up to date. These reference drivers may not work on your system, and by using them you may lose ‘enhanced’ functionality provided by your board manufacturer's drivers. Make sure you retain a copy of your existing drivers before installing these drivers.
Check with your board manufacturer frequently to get updated supported drivers. The ‘Links’ subdirectory of this archive contains pointers to many board maker’s driver download areas.
Installation Instructions
To install these reference drivers:
- You MUST read and agree to the license file included in this archive before installing these drivers.
- IMPORTANT! Make sure that you are using the most recent BIOS released by your board manufacturer! These drivers may not function properly with older BIOS versions. Check with your board manufacturer (see the ‘Links’ directory) and bring your BIOS up to date before attempting to install these drivers.
WARNING: Attempting to install a BIOS not intended for your specific board may render your graphics board permanently unusable. Experiment with your BIOS at your own risk. The BIOS must be matched to your very specific board configuration, and only a board manufacturer can do this. For this reason, Rendition does not make a reference BIOS available at this time.
- ALSO IMPORTANT! Completely remove your current driver and make sure that Windows is running with the generic VGA driver before attempting to install this driver release. Attempting to install this driver on top of a prior release may cause compatibility and stability problems.
- Open the "Display Properties" control panel, choose the "Settings" tab, and click the "Advanced Properties" button.
- On the "Adapter" tab click the "Change" button.
- Click "Have Disk".
- Browse to the ‘Driver’ subdirectory of this archive.
- Click "OK" several times to restart with the new driver.
Troubleshooting
Again, these drivers are unsupported by Rendition.
End-users are recommended to use drivers provided by their board manufacturer to ensure that they can obtain full support.
Please post bug reports on Rendition's discussion server at http://www.rendition.com/forums.html,
or go directly to news://news.rendition.com/rendition.support
to see what experiences other users have been having.
Also, please be sure and read the Release Notes for specific hints and tips about using this driver.