New NVIDIA ForceWare drivers out. R185s promise significant gains

When we took a look at the GeForce GTX 275 GPU yesterday, performance in some games was alarmingly close to the single-GPU champ, GeForce GTX 285. The reason for the closeness was down to, in the main, the use of NVIDIA's ForceWare R185 beta drivers, which promised a ~10 per cent increase in frame-rate when running high resolutions coupled with also-high image-quality settings. The other GeForce cards, we noted, were with older WHQL drivers.

We used the drivers on the proviso that NVIDIA would release a similar-performing set to the public within a few days. NVIDIA's been busy, it seems, as it's officially posted a newer WHQL set - 182.50 vs. 181.22 - and some beta 185.65 drivers - well, kind of.

Looking at the R182.50s first, NVIDIA claims:

New in Release 182.50:

Optimized single GPU and SLI support for upcoming PC games.
Numerous bug fixes. Refer to the release documentation notes.
Users without US English operating systems can select their language and download the International driver here.

New in Release 182 Drivers:

Boosts performance in several 3D applications. The following are examples of improvements measured with Release 182 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.

Ironically enough, Race Driver: GRID is the one game that we had problems with when using R185.65s.

You can download the ForceWare 182.50s here.

The ForceWare 185.65 beta drivers were available to download yesterday evening, direct from NVIDIA, but seem to have been pulled for some reason or other. That's a shame, really, because they promised even-greater gains over ForceWare 182.xx:

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

The Release 185 link from the above page - http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_185.65_beta.html - goes nowhere right now. Hmmm indeed.

Update: 12:25

NVIDIA has now released ForceWare 185.66 beta drivers - thanks to forum-member cobhc for pointing this out.

You can download them from the main driver page

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Given that the 185 drivers *haven't* been released to the public, are we going to get the GTX275 rebenched with the 182 drivers? ;)

Yay for more per-game (typical benchmark games too!) tweaking!.. Why don't they focus on bug fixes and generic code optimisations instead?

scaryjim
Given that the 185 drivers *haven't* been released to the public, are we going to get the GTX275 rebenched with the 182 drivers? ;)

If they're not available by the end of play tonight, yes, we will rebench the card with R182s. :)

New NVIDIA ForceWare drivers out. R185s promise significant gains

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