NVIDIA has released their much anticipated ForceWare Release 80 drivers with beta version 81.84 today. The Release 80 drivers contain new features and performance improvements. Owners of AMD's Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors will see increases in performance ranging from 10-15% in a number of popular games.
One reason Release 80 was launched today was to fix potential problems that GeForce 6 and 7 Series owners might encounter when running Lionhead Studio's Black and White 2 with Release 75 drivers. As such, NVIDIA has taken preventative measures and released a new version of the ForceWare drivers to ensure end-users enjoy the best possible gaming experience possible.
Black and White 2
Problems with Black and White 2 that were resolved include performance slowdowns and texture corruption. NVIDIA included an SLI profile for Black and White 2 and with the additional SLI profiles that were delivered, there are over 150 SLI optimized games and applications.
Release highlights include:
Beta driver to support the availability of the game Black and White 2
Dynamic SLI with no rebooting when using a single monitor
Mixed vendor support for SLI
Performance enhancements for dual-core CPUs
PureVideo high definition de-interlacing support
Usability enhancements when connecting to an HDTV
Support for NVIDIA mobile GPUs
Should you be interested in using these drivers, please refer to the Driver Release Notes first, which contain issue that were resolved along with open issues.
NVIDIA CONTROL PANEL
Bundled with the Release 81.82 drivers that we tested is a beta version of NVIDIA's new control panel. The control panel was developed with input from NVIDIA focus groups and provides a much needed improvement to the user interface.
Beta NVIDIA Control Panel
Beta NVIDIA Control Panel
Beta NVIDIA Control Panel
DOOM 3 & FAR CRY PERFORMANCE
Specifications for the test system, which is based on a non-dual core Pentium 4 processor, can be found here.
Doom3 demo1 Demo
Tit for tat, performance in Doom 3 hasn't been affected at all.
Far Cry Regulator Demo
A couple 2 fps deltas. Nothing to get worried about.
Far Cry Training Demo
Now this is where there was the most difference, mainly at no antialiasing and no anisotropic filtering as the delta between the two ForceWare versions are 6 at 1024x768 get cut in half with every increased resolution step.
Version 81.82 of the ForceWare Release 80 drivers bring a number of noteworthy items to the plate, along with preventative measures for Black and White 2 slowdowns. Feedback is being collected in this forum thread.
