Forceware 75.90 Now!

[dsio]

info that i included in the info section of these drivers on aoafiles.com:

Nvidia beta drivers 75.90 for all Geforce, Geforce GO, Quadro and TNT2 cards. These drivers give a long awaited performance boost to NV4X cards along with improved image quality, several game related bug fixes, and a new interface. These drivers have a temperature reporting bug. The drivers report temperatures up to 20 degrees celcius above normal. To fix this problem, install CoolBits 2.0 to allow the overclocking tab, and overclock your 2D, core speed by 5-20mhz. This will fix the temperature issue. Remember, overclock the 2D to fix it, overclocking the 3D speed is the same as always but has no effect on temperature reports.

For all NV4x owners, these are the drivers we've been waiting for. This driver has all the image quality settings and abilities of previous drivers, including negative LOD Bias clamp, improved texture filtering, improved AA speed, and very good sharpness. So far i have found no issues at all with these drivers except the CS:S de_aztec grass shader issue, which is valve to blame not nvidia.

Performance is up across the board. 3dmark05 improved by around 500-700 points on a 6800GT, 3dmark03 has some performance gains, CS:S performs around 4-5fps better, doom3 performs up to 8-12 fps better, NFSU2 has a very large performance improvement that allowed me to up from 4XAA to 8XAA and 8XAF to 16XAF at 1024/768.

individual performance gains may vary, these are just my experiences with the system in my sig operating at stock speed on the GPU, and 2.6Ghz on the CPU. From all ive seen, these are THE DRIVERS TO HAVE, for 6800 owners, and 6600 owners alike.

Can be found here:
http://files.aoaforums.com/index.php?dir=138
22MB

[chrisbard]

Hey Dsio thank for sharing with us. I'll give it a try.

[dsio]

K mate, good luck, give us a shout with your findings Ive only tested it on a 6800, be nice to see if NV35 owners get a similar boost.

[chrisbard]

Sure thing, I'll focus on CS S, Far Cry and HL2.

[XeroHouR]

Ahh I remember when I found this kind of driver with my 5900, I was so happy for more free performance, lets hope these do the trick again!

[GrahamGarside]

cheers downloading as we speak

[dsio]

Word on the wire is that valance studios are working on these drivers as we speak, aiming at around a march 1st release date. There are claims that the modded version of these drivers could offer as much as a 15% global performance boost over nvidia's current stock drivers, the 67.66s. That is *insane*.
i remember with one of the 5x.xx driver releases, the 5800 had a 25%-40% increase across the board, this one isnt quite in that territory but its free speed to be had
incidently, i just tested 3dmark03.
previous score, 13,500 3dmarks stock GPU
new score, 14,700 3dmarks stock GPU
also, i havnt tested with far cry yet, so tell us what its like.

[GrahamGarside]

3dmark03 went from 10267 with the 71.24's to 10453

[XeroHouR]

Yea, my aquamark flies, but im well below my highest score settings, still almost 1000 points ahead in the video card from what I should be at. HL2 runs way better with 16xAF up than it used to. Maybe I'll try a higher res or something later. Good call on the drivers. However I encounted one bug already, due to the fact that they are beta. When I turned on "reflect all" the walls showed the purple squares that I believe indicate reflective surface. It went away when I changed that. Also I didn't get the temp bug *shrug*

[Daniel ~]

Thanks dsio! Be sure to let us know when the valence drivers show up! ":O}

[benighted]

Any word on a newer 64 bit release?

[dsio]

Nvidia is said to be holding off on further 64 bit releases until the pot settles somewhat. With EMT64 chips shipping now, RC2 of x64 windows and full windows xp 64 due not too many moons away i get the impression they will watch what happens before another release.

[dsio]

Also, info from nvidia is that there hasnt been an official non-beta driver launched since the 66.93s due to the fact that they want their next official release to be THE driver to use for SLI cards. apparently nvidia has been very aware of SLI owners' misgivings about the new technology and are seeking to greatly improve support by the next release.

The intention is to say "66.93 was just SLI in its beta stage, it was never the real thing" and to have a massive amount of support for various game profiles, some sort of auto profiling tool available, and several improvements to the load balancing in SLI as at many points in some games (farcry included) balancing is very skewed at the moment.

All of the recent beta releases in the 7x.xx series have slowly been improving SLI, and its hoped that by the time their official driver is ready for release, nobody will complain about it any more. The other two things being worked on apparently are 1. getting SM3.0 into common usage, and 2. stopping machines with "stolen" or as it has even been put in an australian magazine "Pirated" SLI from operating with recent high performance drivers, as some modders have been able to run newer drivers on these modded NF4U boards.

[benighted]

Thanks for the info

Looks like I'm going to have to shell out some cash for the final release pretty soon .