NVIDIA Releases New Windows 7 Driver Set
by Gary Key on April 30, 2009 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Gary's First Looks
With the "official" release of Windows 7 RC to the MSDN and TechNet subscribers today along with the public release scheduled for May 5th, NVIDIA released beta GPU driver set 185.81 today. The 32-bit driver set is available here and the 64-bit release is located here. Our first results this morning indicate this driver set is much more polished than the 181.71 release, along with several improvements in gaming performance and platform stability. NVIDIA also released the 185.81 driver set for the Vista and XP operating systems.
The release notes are listed below:
This is a beta driver supporting GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, and 200-series desktop GPUs. This driver package installs WDDM v1.1 for GeForce 8, 9, and 200-series (DirectX 10) GPUs and WDDM v1.0 for GeForce 6 and 7-series (DirectX 9) GPUs.
This driver supports all of the new Windows 7 GPU-accelerated DirectX APIs: DirectX Compute, Direct2D, DirectWrite, and DXVA-HD.
New in Release 185.81:
- 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.
- Adds support for CUDA 2.2 for improved performance in GPU Computing applications. See CUDA for more details.
- Expands GPU hardware acceleration for the NVIDIA Video Encoding library to GPUs with less than 32 cores. Applications using this library include CyberLink PowerDirector 7, Nero Move it 1.5, Loilo SuperLoiloScope MARS, and CyberLink MediaShow Espresso.
- Accelerates performance in several 3D applications. The following are examples of improvements measured with Release 185 drivers vs. Release 181 drivers (results will vary depending on your GPU, system configuration, and game settings):
- Up to 25% performance increase in The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
- Up to 22% performance increase in 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 30% performance increase in Half-Life 2 engine games with 3-way and 4-way SLI
- Up to 45% performance increase in Mirror’s Edge with antialiasing enabled
- Up to 25% performance increase in The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
- Automatically installs the new PhysX System Software version 9.09.0408.
- Supports GeForce Plus Power Pack #3. Download these FREE PhysX and CUDA applications now!
- 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.
Existing Support:
- Supports single GPU and NVIDIA SLI technology on DirectX 9, DirectX 10, and OpenGL, including 3-way SLI, Quad SLI, and SLI support on SLI-certified Intel X58-based motherboards.
- Includes full support for OpenGL 3.0.
- Supports NVIDIA PhysX acceleration on a dedicated GeForce graphics card. Use one card for graphics and dedicate a different card for PhysX processing for game-changing physical effects. Learn more here. Note: GPU PhysX is supported on all GeForce 8-series, 9-series and 200-series GPUs with a minimum of 256MB dedicated graphics memory.
- Supports GPU overclocking and temperature monitoring by installing NVIDIA System Tools software.
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Griswold - Saturday, May 2, 2009 - link
What nvidia did (or not did..) back in 2007 was what drove me away from nvidia completely and I have no intention to go back anytime soon.And it wasnt just the ridiculous video drivers. The icing on the cake was the non-functional chipset drivers for indeed 6 months.
kilkennycat - Friday, May 1, 2009 - link
nV's Vista drivers work just fine in Win 7 beta Build7000. The 'real' Win 7 nV drivers incorporate just Win7-specific improvements .... Remember Win 7 is really Vista+ or Vista "SP3". Nothing much new here except with Win 7 that M$ has honed the efficiency of the Win7 (er, Vista) OS core and added useful bells and whistles. This core efficiency will never be offered to Vista users and any other feature upgrades to Vista will be entirely at M$$'s whim... would not want to cannibalise sales of Win 7 with competitive updates to Vista, that would never do...!! Remember Dx10 never being offered as a Win XP upgrade? Well, M$$ is up to variants on that old trick again with Win 7 vs Vista. Do not be fooled by all the marketing hype.weevil - Saturday, May 2, 2009 - link
I hate when people use the dollar sign when referring to MS... As if a company making money is a bad thing. Hugo Chavez want YOU...theslug - Wednesday, May 6, 2009 - link
Finally, someone else who thinks so!!! I hope these people realize when they do something lame like that it completely invalidates everything else they say.mindless1 - Sunday, May 3, 2009 - link
I hate when people don't realize that competition and consumer choice improve products, and that these things tend to happen at a greatly retarded rate when there's a monopoly deprofitizing competition.Nobody ever said MS didn't deserve to make a bundle did they? There's a difference between taking everything you could ever need and taking so much that there's nothing left for anyone else. Hmm. Maybe if MS had some competition then the company a lot of people like would be driven to make their products even better.
The0ne - Thursday, April 30, 2009 - link
They were absolutely horrible! I definitely don't want to have to go through the same pains again with Win7. Already pretty happy with the test of Win7 so planning on converting XP over when the release arrives.ThePooBurner - Friday, May 1, 2009 - link
[quote]They were absolutely horrible! I definitely don't want to have to go through the same pains again with Win7.[/quote]Neither does MS. they are putting 7 out so quick to get rid of the bad PR from the vista debacle. I wouldn't be surprised if once they had everything ready they sat on it for a few months to allow hardware manufacturers a chance to finish polishing the initial drivers so the out the gate performance is great and everyone will think "this is so much better than vista!" and tell their friends and everyone will upgrade just to get rid of "that awful vista" thus boosting the Win7 market share out the door and increase the speed of it's adoption.
nilepez - Wednesday, May 6, 2009 - link
The vista debacle was largely an issue with 3rd party drivers. Yes there were bugs, but there were bugs with Apple's Leopard and, for that matter, XP, which many site wouldn't recommend for well over a year.The reality is that many of the problems were fixed by summer of 2007.
Where MS got screwed was by very effective (and largely misleading) apple Ads and the media that reported that there were huge problems long after they were all fixed.
I'm looking forward to 7, but there's nothing wrong with Vista (it's certainly better than XP for all but those clinging to very old H/W (my old Athlon 64 3000 could easily run Vista).
I'm sure there will be less problems with Windows 7, but that's like saying there were less problems with Windows 98 or XP SP2 (originally intended to be a new Windows release)....those were all largely revisions of the earlier OS (respectively, Win 95 and XP RTM/SP1)