Forceware 185.81 beta drivers, all flavors (even Windows 7!)

NoxTek

NoxTek

The Geek Redneck
Joined
May 27, 2002
Messages
9,300
Some new beta driver goodness out and about today, most notably much newer Windows 7 WDDM 1.1 drivers! Check 'em out! :)


Courtesy Guru3D:

Forceware 185.81 - Windows 7 x64
Forceware 185.81 - Windows 7 x86

Forceware 185.81 - Windows Vista x64
Forceware 185.81 - Windows Vista x86

Forceware 185.81 - Windows XP x64
Forceware 185.81 - Windows XP x86



From the Windows 7 Release Notes:

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

    [*]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.
Click to expand...
 
They seem to be OK to me, none of the weird problems in Windows 7 that some other people are experiencing. The only problem I have is with the text on tabs or buttons in the Windows GUI 'vanishing', which is the same problem I've had with every other Win7 WDDM 1.1 driver set from Nvidia.
 
After installing these I got a message from Windows 7.

Your version of windows might be counterfeit!
 
Let me just say that the ambient occlusion feature makes a subtle but significant improvement to the image quality and depth of Team Fortress 2 and Fallout 3. Runs great on an 8800GTX 4xaa 1680x1050 16xaf.
 
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