NVIDIA is Lazy and possibly colluding with Microsoft....

My laptop has an 8600M GS NVIDIA GPU. As we all know, NVIDIA uses a UDA (Unified Driver Architecture) which means newer drivers for newer cards will work on older cards. This is true up to this day with the 9800 series and the most recent Forceware.

So why isn't my 8600M GS being seen in XP? It's simple - NVIDIA REFUSED TO ADD ONE LINE OF CODE TO THE INF FILE - namely the DeviceID of the hardware part. That was the ONLY thing required to make the card work flawlessly under XP (The only thing you would not get would be the TurboCache feature of using system memory with your already-dedicated GPU memory.) It took me THREE MINUTES to modify the installer and the INF file (thirty minutes to learn how to do both) and the card works without a hitch - Even Assassin's Creed runs better on this laptop than on a dedicated PS3 (PS3 gets framerate issues, the laptop doesn't.)

There's only one reason I can think of that NVIDIA wouldn't put in one line of code to make a GPU work with current compatible drivers and OSes - forcing Vista-only hardware into the market.

My next purchase will be an ATi card. I'm already looking at the 48** series, and it's BEATING THE SNOT out of my new 9800GTX, especially now since they've hacked PhysX to work on ATi cards (3DMark Vantage score jumped from 18,000 to 22,000 with the hack - apparently physics processing doesn't bother the GPU much at all for such a drastic bump in performance!)