NVIDIA today released two beta GeForce driver packages, 197.75 beta for GeForce 400 series products, and 197.57 beta for GeForce 6 series thru GeForce 300 series. While these drivers don't come with big lists of changes, NVIDIA recommends that you use these drivers to play the beta release of APB (All Points Bulletin).

DOWNLOAD:

• GeForce 197.75 beta for GeForce 400 series, for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit;
• GeForce 197.54 beta for GeForce 6 series thru GeForce 300 series, for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

NVIDIA released version 197.41 of its GeForce driver suite, specifically for the DirectX 11 compliant GeForce 400 series GPUs. These drivers are WHQL-signed, and come in time for the market-availability of GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 graphics cards. Although NVIDIA didn't mark out any significant changes to this version, it bundles PhysX system software v9.10.0129, and on-chip HD audio driver v1.0.9.1. These drivers enable support for CUDA 3.0 and OpenGL 3.2. A proper release-notes document from the company is awaited for more details.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 197.41 WHQL for GeForce GTX 400 series

NVIDIA's recently released GeForce 196.75 WHQL drivers are causing problems with some users reporting "intermittent low FPS", in the words of Blizzard's technical staff. It notes that the drivers have a bug in its fan-speed control that causes graphics cards to overheat when running applications such as Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft and StarCraft 2 Beta. Not only does bad fan control result in bad application performance, but can also damage the graphics accelerator. Blizzard on its part advised users to revert to older versions of the GeForce driver. Version 196.21 (older WHQL-signed driver) can be downloaded from here.

Update (3/5): NVIDIA has withdrawn the 196.75 WHQL drivers from its website. The company is working to resolve this issue.

NVIDIA released version 196.75 of its GeForce driver suite. The drivers are WHQL signed. It adds support for new NVIDIA GPUs, notably the ION 2 GPU, apart from GeForce 300 series mobile GPUs, and the existing lineup of GeForce GPUs, 6-series and above. GeForce 196.75 WHQL also packs the updated 9.10.0129 PhysX system software, and an updated version 1.0.9.1 driver for NVIDIA GPUs with embedded HD audio. Apart from these there are application specific performance increments:

• Up to 13% performance increase in Crysis: Warhead with a single GPU
• Up to 30% performance increase in Crysis: Warhead with SLI technology
• Up to 13% performance increase in H.A.W.X with single GPU
• Up to 15% performance increase in H.A.W.X with SLI technology
• Up to 30% performance increase in Left 4 Dead with single GPU
• Up to 28% performance increase in Left 4 Dead with SLI technology

SLI profiles are added for Assassin Creed II, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Command and Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight, Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City, Mass Effect 2, Napoleon: Total War, and Zombie Driver. SLI support is improved further for World of Warcraft, and Unigine. It adds Ambient Occlusion support for Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, Need for Speed: Shift, Resident Evil 5, RUSE, and Street Fighter IV. AA issue for Mass Effect 2 is fixed with an AA override added. A large number of other bug fixes were included, and issues resolved. Refer to the Release Notes documents (for Windows 7/Vista, Windows XP), for more information.</br>


DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 196.75 WHQL

Apart from being the industry's leading 3D graphics benchmark application, 3DMark has had a long history of 3D graphics hardware manufacturers cheating with their hardware using application-specific optimisations against Futuremark's guidelines to boost 3DMark scores. Often, this is done by drivers detecting the 3DMark executable, and downgrading image quality, so the graphics processor has to handle lesser amount of processing load from the application, and end up with a higher performance score. Time and again, similar application-specific optimisations have tarnished 3DMark's credibility as an industry-wide benchmark.

This time around, it's neither of the two graphics giants in the news for the wrong reasons, it's Intel. Although the company has a wide consumer base of integrated graphics, perhaps the discerning media user / very-casual gamer finds it best to opt for integrated graphics (IGP) solutions from NVIDIA or AMD. Such choices rely upon reviews evaluating the IGPs performance at accelerating video (where it's common knowledge that Intel's IGPs rely heavily on the CPU for smooth video playback, while competing IGPs fare better at hardware-acceleration), synthetic and real-world 3D benchmarks, among other application-specific tests.

Despite NVIDIA now releasing their own SLI patches, EVGA have still continued to release theirs. Version 14 is based on NVIDIA's 190.38 Drivers.

New SLI profiles from EVGA SLI Enhancement Patch:

• Enables SLI support for Section 8
• Enables SLI support for Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal
• Enables SLI support for Rise of Flight
• Enables SLI support for FUEL
• Enables SLI support for Prototype digital version
• Enables SLI support for Merchants of Brooklyn

NVIDIA has just released new WHQL certified driver kit for its GeForce 3D Vision technology. 3D Vision driver version 185.85 adds support for Mitsubishi Home Theater TVs and also several new game titles that now can benefit from the 3D glasses and 120 Hz LCD monitors. The full list of game names is below the "Read full story" marker.

DOWNLOAD: Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit | Windows 7 32-bit and 64-bit

Since Microsoft kicked off its WHQL certification program for Windows 7, hardware vendors such as NVIDIA have taken serious initiatives to release new drivers that are certified to run with the new OS. Less than a week after releasing GeForce 185.85 WHQL drivers for Windows 7, NVIDIA today made nForce WHQL drivers official. NVIDIA uses a unified driver for its nForce series motherboard chipsets, which are of two main classes: for chipsets with integrated GeForce graphics, and for chipsets without integrated graphics. nForce WHQL 15.35 supports nForce chipsets for both AMD and Intel platforms without integrated graphics, while nForce WHQL 15.37 deals with support for nForce chipsets for both platforms with integrated graphics. Refer to the "supported products" tab at NVIDIA's driver page for more information. The driver package provides drivers for the Ethernet controller(s), SATA/IDE controller, RAID/AHCI controller, SMU, the IGP (depending on the driver you choose, and if an IGP is present), and provides Network Management Tools along with RAIDTool. You need to install the appropriate driver irrespective of your chipset featuring an IGP that has been disabled.

DOWNLOAD:

• nForce 15.35 (nForce models without IGP) for Windows 7 32-bit | Windows 7 64-bit
• nForce 15.37 (nForce models with IGP) for Windows 7 32-bit | Windows 7 64-bit

NVIDIA Corporation, the inventor of the GPU, today announced the release of its OpenCL driver and software development kit (SDK) to developers participating in its OpenCL Early Access Program. NVIDIA is providing this release to solicit early feedback in advance of a beta release which will be made available to all GPU Computing Registered Developers in the coming months.

"The OpenCL standard was developed on NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA was the first company to demonstrate OpenCL code running on a GPU," said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of technology and content at NVIDIA. "Being the first to release an OpenCL driver to developers cements NVIDIA's leadership in GPU Computing and is another key milestone in our ongoing strategy to make the GPU the soul of the modern PC."

AMD have just released their ATI Catalyst 9.4 Driver for Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP. Highlights of the ATI Catalyst 9.4 Windows release include:

New Features

• ATI Catalyst 9.4 includes a new ATI Overdrive auto-tune application to estimate the over-clocked engine and memory values for ATI Overdrive supported ATI Radeon Graphics accelerators
  Designed for the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series

Resolved Issue Highlights

• "World of Warcraft" or "World of Warcraft - Wrath of the Lich King": Flickering no longer occurs when Shadow is set to medium/high using ATI CrossFire configurations
• Google Sketchup no longer displays blank screen
• Resolutions above 1024 x 768 will now full screen properly for specific HDMI displays
• Artifacts no longer visible while playing Age of Conan DX10
• VC-1 progressive disc playback no longer exhibits block corruption.
• The Compute Abstraction Layer (CAL) driver now functions properly under Windows XP

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst version 9.4 for Windows XP/Vista/7 (32/64-bit versions)

Less than a week since they released the 185.66 BETA drivers (which in themselves superceeded the 182.50 WHQL and 185.65 BETA drivers in the space of 24 hours), NVIDIA has released yet another GeForce BETA Driver of version number 185.68. From these latest BETA releases, it seems NVIDIA has dropped support for the 8-Series graphics cards which as of now are only supported using the 182.50 WHQL driver. With the recent release of so many driver revisions from NVIDIA, it could be their answer to what EVGA were trying to do with their SLI Enhancement Patches, to keep up to date with the latest releases. This driver supports GeForce 9-series, 100-series, and 200-series desktop GPUs, the only documented change in this version over the 185.66 BETA drivers is:

• Optimized performance for the PC game The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

DOWNLOAD: GeForce 185.68 BETA for Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows Vista 32-bit | Windows Vista 64-bit

The day after releasing the GeForce 182.50 WHQL drivers, NVIDIA has also released a GeForce BETA driver with version 185.66, for both Windows Vista and XP.

New in Release 185.66:

• Adds support for the new GeForce GTX 275 GPU.
• Adds support for Ambient Occlusion - the newest NVIDIA Control Panel feature to offer enhanced 3D gaming realism exclusively to GeForce GPUs. (Vista Only)
• Adds support for CUDA 2.2 for improved performance in GPU Computing applications. See nvidia.com/cuda for more details.
• Accelerates performance in several 3D applications. The following are examples of improvements measured with Release 185 drivers vs. Release 182 drivers (results will vary depending on your GPU, system configuration, and game settings):
  - Up to 11% performance increase in Call of Duty: World at War
  - Up to 5% performance increase Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
  - Up to 22% performance increase Crysis: Warhead with antialiasing enabled
  - Up to 11% performance increase in Fallout 3 with antialiasing enabled
  - Up to 14% performance increase in Far Cry 2
  - Up to 45% performance increase in Mirror's Edge with antialiasing enabled
• Supports GeForce Plus Power Pack #3. Download these FREE PhysX and CUDA applications now!
• Numerous bug fixes. Refer to the release documentation notes.

DOWNLOAD: GeForce 185.66 BETA for Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows Vista 32-bit | Windows Vista 64-bit

UPDATE: The day following the release of the 185.65 BETA drivers this article originally covered, NVIDIA removed the driver links and updated the BETA to 185.66, this article has therefore been updated accordingly.

Only one day after releasing the GeForce 182.46 BETA Driver, NVIDIA yesterday launched the 182.47 BETA Driver, to support the launch of the Khronos Group's announcement of the new OpenGL 3.1 streamlined specification found here. Although it has not made it onto the main driver page yet, the drivers are available to download from the NVIDIA Developer Zone. For more information, release notes and Linux download links, you can find the driver page here

DOWNLOAD: GeForce 182.47 BETA for Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows Vista 32-bit | Windows Vista 64-bit.

NVIDIA today published an updated GeForce 3D Vision driver that's meant to work with Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit versions. One of the requirements in order to install the 3D Vision driver is to have GeForce release 182.08 graphics drivers already on your PC (the download package contains the driver if you don't have it). Version 1.06 of the GeForce 3D Vision driver:

• Adds support for GeForce GTS 250.
• Adds support for Burnout Paradise Trial. Please visit the Burnout Paradise nZone.com website to download the trial version
• Fixed issue with NVIDIA Stereoscopic 3D Video Player which caused the video to be compressed horizontally

DOWNLOAD: CD v1.06 (GeForce GPU driver v182.08, GeForce 3D Vision driver v182.08) (212 MB)

AMD today released the latest version of their ATI video driver, Catalyst 9.3. The key addition with this release is official support for Windows 7, in the form of a unified graphics driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista. As part of supporting Windows 7, Catalyst 9.3 supports WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) 1.1 for all ATI Radeon HD 4000, HD 3000 and HD 2000 series of graphics cards. According to AMD, "this new WDDM 1.1 support utilizes DirectX 10 rather than DirectX 9 and can cut down your GPU memory usage by half when opening up multiple windows thereby enabling increased performance."

AMD have said the driver brings performance benefits in several cases where framerates are CPU limited and using ATI Stream technology, owners of the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of graphics accelerators will see a performance boost in their Folding@Home scores when running the latest Folding@Home client. AMD only documented one performance improvement in the release notes:

• Lost Planet: Colonies gains up to 20% on 4800 series products, and up to 50% on 4600, 4500 and 4300 series products

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst version 9.3 for Windows XP/Vista/7 (32/64-bit versions)

Just over a week since we covered the release of the 182.05 BETA driver, NVIDIA have now released a WHQL with version number 182.06. The driver has been released for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista and is for GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, and 200-series desktop GPUs.

New in Release 182.06:

• Recommended for the best experience in F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.
• Boosts performance in numerous 3D applications. The following are some examples of improvements measured with Release 182.06 WHQL drivers vs. Release 181.22 WHQL drivers (results will vary depending on your GPU, system configuration, and game settings):
• Up to 8% performance increase in Fallout 3 at high resolution and AA.
• Up to 10% performance increase in F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.
• Up to 9% performance increase in Half-Life 2 at high resolution with AA.
• Up to 11% performance increase in Left 4 Dead at high resolution with AA.
• Up to 10% performance increase in Race Driver: GRID at high resolution and AA.
• Includes full support for OpenGL 3.0 on GeForce 8-series, 9-series, and 200-series GPUs.
• Automatically installs the new PhysX System Software version 9.09.0203.
• Additional information on specific bug fixes can be found in the release documentation notes.

DOWNLOAD NVIDIA Forceware 182.06 WHQL for Windows XP 32-bit | Windows Vista 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows Vista 64-bit