As the title says. When I boot into Windows 7 everything's fine; the directx tests pass, the nv tests pass, and I get awesome fps in games. But when I point my Parallels "machine" at the boot camp partition I get a warning message to get the correct drivers for my video card. What gives? There's an nv 6800GT in my laptop; what is going on? If I run the nv utility from within the VM I get a message saying that no nvidia cards were found in the system.
NVIDIA card doesn't appear in a VM, there's Parallels virtual graphics device instead. The reason you see the warning is because you didn't install Parallels Tools.
Nope, Parallels tools is installed and I restarted the VM, no change. I uninstalled and reinstalled the VM to no avail. Parallels Build 8.0.18354.
Boot your VM and make sure the warning message is on screen, generate a Problem report via Parallels Help menu and post report ID here.
This message comes from NVIDIA control panel, not from Windows device manager. As I said above, NVIDIA graphics of your Mac is not visible in a VM. Parallels provides its own virtual graphics device and drivers for Windows, which enable 3D acceleration and Windows Aero. Since the warning comes from NVIDIA applet I'd suggest to boot in boot camp and download the latest drivers from NVIDIA site. Hopefully, newer driver handles such situation [of missing device] better.