NVIDIA GeForce 295.73 WHQL Drivers Released

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NVIDIA sends word that the new NVIDIA GeForce 295.73 WHQL drivers are now available for download. Grab them if you need them, try them if you haven't. Here's a list of the GeForce 295.73 WHQL driver highlights:

GeForce R295 highlights include:
  • Game-changing performance boost of up to 45% in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, “the fastest selling title in Steam’s history”
  • Over 90% SLI scaling in Mass Effect 3.
  • GeForce-exclusive quality enhancements with ambient occlusion support for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Diablo III, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
  • New 3D Vision and SLI profiles for over 50 titles.
  • New PhysX software for the best experience in top PhysX titles like Alice: Madness Returns and Batman: Arkham City.
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sweet SLI profile for oilrush.. now if only i had a dx11 card :( oh well still looks good in dx10.
 
NKDietrich said:
I like that Mass Effect 3 scaling bit.
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This is why I'm still holding out an upgrade to see what nVidia has to offer. Given the choice, I'd prefer to stay with their cards for their quick driver support for new games.


By the way, still nothing on the rumored fps limiter?
 
Hmmm, I hope this fixes the 1.5gb of memory leakage that every beta since 285 introduced for me.
 
Hornet said:
This is why I'm still holding out an upgrade to see what nVidia has to offer. Given the choice, I'd prefer to stay with their cards for their quick driver support for new games.


By the way, still nothing on the rumored fps limiter?
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For ME3? I know in the demo you can modify the FPS cap in a config file, but I don't know if there's one by default.

XamediX said:
Hmmm, I hope this fixes the 1.5gb of memory leakage that every beta since 285 introduced for me.
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It should. It was an issue with DX video acceleration, and they claimed they were able to reproduce and fix it. If we're talking about the same issue anyway.
 
Any ideas this release supports the 560ti 448c cards? I'm currently using a 290.xx beta driver.
 
NKDietrich said:
It should. It was an issue with DX video acceleration, and they claimed they were able to reproduce and fix it. If we're talking about the same issue anyway.
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I hope we are. I noticed after updating to a couple newer versions that my video would become really choppy after awhile in MPC:HT. Then I noticed an extra ~1.4gb of memory that I could not account for anywhere in my performance monitors. Logging off didn't help and only when I restarted did it go away. I tried looking into a whole bunch of other reasons, even re-installing windows(heh) until I downgraded to 285, and the problem was gone.

I'll check this out when I get home tonight.
 
Wait, what? Releasing drivers BEFORE the game comes out? What is this nonsense???
 
I wonder if this fixes all the instability problems with multiple video playback... they claim it was fixed in 295.51 but it sure as hell wasn't.
 
And this is pretty much why I dont buy AMD. While their cards are a great value, and the drivers are better. Nvidia is still king when it comes to drivers. When you pay $400+ for a card, you just want it to work right day 1.
 
XamediX said:
I hope we are. I noticed after updating to a couple newer versions that my video would become really choppy after awhile in MPC:HT. Then I noticed an extra ~1.4gb of memory that I could not account for anywhere in my performance monitors. Logging off didn't help and only when I restarted did it go away. I tried looking into a whole bunch of other reasons, even re-installing windows(heh) until I downgraded to 285, and the problem was gone.

I'll check this out when I get home tonight.
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Yeah I had the problem in VLC. Eventually my memory would be entirely gone. Haven't seen the problem yet since upgraded to the WHQL version. We shall see.
 
demingo said:
And this is pretty much why I dont buy AMD. While their cards are a great value, and the drivers are better. Nvidia is still king when it comes to drivers. When you pay $400+ for a card, you just want it to work right day 1.
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I don't have a 79xx in my machine (yet) but take a look at gtx 560 ti and BF3. How many months ago was it released and they still haven't fixed all the artifacts and white/clear screens of death?

I'm not blinded by a logo, both are likely guilty of many things, but I don't think nvidia is perfect and I am experiencing their negligence.
 
wand3r3r said:
I don't have a 79xx in my machine (yet) but take a look at gtx 560 ti and BF3. How many months ago was it released and they still haven't fixed all the artifacts and white/clear screens of death?

I'm not blinded by a logo, both are likely guilty of many things, but I don't think nvidia is perfect and I am experiencing their negligence.
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Yeah, nVidia just releases few drivers, so the issue posts/threads are spread thinner than the near week releases of some AMD driver groups, IMO. Though there are, at times, however, serious issues AMD's taken months to fix, like cursor corruption in SC2 (which, BTW, a friend with a HD5850 sees on/off STILL, in SC2), or video accelleration related bugs in the HD5000 series which they simply never fixed (admittedly, that was due to letting AIB partners do whatever they wanted with the VBIOS, and AMD paid the price for it, but nevertheless, it really was AMD's fault).

And to be honest, as an owner of an AMD switchable GPU laptop, I'm not impressed, at all. I'd MUCH rather have a nVidia supported Optimus system. By a long shot, and then some.

Though on the desktop market, the reason I'm staying with nVidia is almost entirely due to eVGA, since my experience with AMD drivers (*knocks on wood*) has been solid, thus far.
 
AMD desperately needs to learn from this. I just finally got Powertune +20 to mostly stick on my second 7970 in crossfire. Even without overclocking there are still occasional issues in Defense Grid of all things!

Never had any problems like this with GTX580. If Driver support keeps diverging like this then I will probably switch back to green when the 680 comes out much later this year.
 
Teenyman45 said:
AMD desperately needs to learn from this. I just finally got Powertune +20 to mostly stick on my second 7970 in crossfire. Even without overclocking there are still occasional issues in Defense Grid of all things!

Never had any problems like this with GTX580. If Driver support keeps diverging like this then I will probably switch back to green when the 680 comes out much later this year.
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I doubt you need +20 powertune. I can overclock my cards to 1250/1750 with 0% power tune and they don't throttle at all.
 
Says nothing about the performance improvements in regards to the 4XX series (470 there.) Anyone with a 4XX series card see improvements? Otherwise I'll stick to my current drivers.

Hornet said:
This is why I'm still holding out an upgrade to see what nVidia has to offer. Given the choice, I'd prefer to stay with their cards for their quick driver support for new games.
By the way, still nothing on the rumored fps limiter?
Click to expand...

To each their own, but Mass Effect 3 will most likely run the same way Mass Effect 2 did on both vendors hardware. Not in the same league as a fix for a brand new engine. This is hardly a good example and for all you know a simple name addition to a config file was required for ME3. And it's ME, it's going to be the damn UE3 engine from the XBOX with a select few improvements here and there. (And the same damn loading screens from the XBOX version.)


Teenyman45 said:
AMD desperately needs to learn from this. I just finally got Powertune +20 to mostly stick on my second 7970 in crossfire. Even without overclocking there are still occasional issues in Defense Grid of all things!

Never had any problems like this with GTX580. If Driver support keeps diverging like this then I will probably switch back to green when the 680 comes out much later this year.
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I played the demo for defense grid on steam and bought the game on XBOX 360 due to there being no visual improvement just a resolution bump (doesn't help when the textures are very low res) only for the game feeling like it's on crack. (Because it's almost maxed out on XBOX360, an 470 destroys it.) Plus it's much nicer to just fire up the XBOX and play from my bed.

What issues are you having? Throttling? How exactly are you using them to run the game? I ask because number 1, CFX for that game is complete over kill. One of those 7970s is the equivalent of beating a dead horse 10 times before it even hits the ground. Do you have vsync on? etc..
 
Skyrim changes = same already modded by players is my guess.
 
Inu said:
Skyrim changes = same already modded by players is my guess.
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that is if they actually changed anything in these drivers from the last ones.. the problem i've always had with nvidia's driver change logs is they just tack on everything that was changed in pervious drivers as changes in these drivers when in reality nothing changed with the drivers.. was even more annoying a couple years ago when they actually released 6 or 7 WHQL drivers under the same series.. 191.xx 192.xx 193.xx so on and so on.. by the time it got to 197.xx drivers you couldn't even tell what actually was changed since they would just tack everything on from all the drivers before it in the same series. so other then SLI profiles i pretty much ignore the so called performance increases they claim in drivers because they don't even label which drivers from the series originally had the improvement or if it was actually the latest drivers that got it.
 
Does this mean that SWTOR's broken SLI use is still broken? I've been having no luck with the beta drivers after 285.
 
NKDietrich said:
Yeah I had the problem in VLC. Eventually my memory would be entirely gone. Haven't seen the problem yet since upgraded to the WHQL version. We shall see.
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Huh. I thought that was just an issue with the newer 2.0 version of VLC. Go figure.
 
It actually details what the performance improvement is being compared to -

Performance

Increases performance by up to 45% in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (measured with GeForce GTX 560 at 1080p Ultra settings in indoor scenes vs. 285.62).
Updates the NVIDIA Control Panel ambient occlusion support for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to a higher performance profile.
Boosts Mass Effect 3 SLI performance to up to 2x.

Ambient Occlusion

Adds ambient occlusion support for Diablo III. See the comparison screenshots on .
Updates the ambient occlusion support for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to a higher performance profile (also in 290 beta drivers). See the comparison screenshots on .
Adds ambient occlusion support for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (also in 290 beta drivers). See the comparison screenshots on .
Click to expand...

Hornet said:
This is why I'm still holding out an upgrade to see what nVidia has to offer. Given the choice, I'd prefer to stay with their cards for their quick driver support for new games.


By the way, still nothing on the rumored fps limiter?
Click to expand...

You can actually enable this as well as forcing FXAA using Nvidia Inspector. So the functionality is there, just no officially supported. I've been using the fps limiter without issues so far since 290.xx.
 
Nice changelog! Going to try this out right away.

I wonder what contributes to the huge Skyrim boost?
 
NKDietrich said:
Yeah I had the problem in VLC. Eventually my memory would be entirely gone. Haven't seen the problem yet since upgraded to the WHQL version. We shall see.
Click to expand...

There was a forum post about it where an nVidia dev said that they had identified and fixed the problem in the "next build", which was prior to this being released. So my guess is that it's fixed.
 
jeremyshaw said:
Yeah, nVidia just releases few drivers, so the issue posts/threads are spread thinner than the near week releases of some AMD driver groups, IMO. Though there are, at times, however, serious issues AMD's taken months to fix, like cursor corruption in SC2 (which, BTW, a friend with a HD5850 sees on/off STILL, in SC2), or video accelleration related bugs in the HD5000 series which they simply never fixed (admittedly, that was due to letting AIB partners do whatever they wanted with the VBIOS, and AMD paid the price for it, but nevertheless, it really was AMD's fault).
Click to expand...

Ahh, so thats why they locked down the bios on the 6xxx series so that you can't flash a custom fan profile or custom clocks. That sucks.

g1xx3r said:
No Alan Wake SLI profile :(
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Yeah, I was pretty disappointed by that too.
 
TDR driver crashes not fixed still? Getting them with 295.51 betas.
 
Does Alan Wake really need SLI? It's a port of a 2 year old 360 game.

Not being a dick, just can't imagine it's that stressful of a game :p
 
entropy13 said:
You can enable it through Nvidia Inspector even with the previous beta driver.

All it means right now is that it's still not "official."
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I found the one included with EVGA Precision to be much better than the Nvidia Inspector one. It actually works and solved the vsync FMV issue in Force Unleashed 2. The downside to it is its a global limiter, not profile. Still though, easy enough to enable and disable when needed.
 
Rizen said:
Does Alan Wake really need SLI? It's a port of a 2 year old 360 game.

Not being a dick, just can't imagine it's that stressful of a game :p
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I actually have noticed a bit of slowdown at times. Nothing major, but still.
 
MavericK96 said:
I actually have noticed a bit of slowdown at times. Nothing major, but still.
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Surprising. I hear it's a good port though, and they did do enhancements to the graphics, so I guess I can see that happening.
 
Does anyone know if the new drivers fixed the problems with Windows Movie Maker?

Supposed the next set (this one, I suppose) after the last were supposed to fix problems with the last driver, which rendered WMM basically useless, giving only a black screen.

If anyone knows, please give a shout, thanks.
 
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