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If you're the type to throw caution to the wind, cross the road without looking both ways, bungee jump without double checking the cord, or watch an Adam Sandler flick post Waterboy, and if you own an Nvidia graphics card, you can get a sneak peek at the GPU maker's first Release 285 family of drivers by downloading the newly available 285.27 beta driver.
So what's the potential upshot for being a GPU guinea pig? First and foremost, release 285.27 pushes performance gains in a bunch of titles when installed with your GeForce GTX 580 or 560 videcoard. Most are single digit performance gains in SLI, though there are a couple of double-digit boosts, including up to 13 percent in Metro 2033 with SLI (GTX 580) and up to 11 percent in Stalker: Call of Pripyat with SLI (GTX 560).
The beta driver updates the Physx engine and HD audio driver, adds support for OpenGL 4.2 for GeForce 400 series and 500 series GPUs, and fleshes out Nvidia's 3D Vision technology, among other changes.
Beta Driver Download and Release Notes
Image Credit: zazzle.com
Comments are closed on this article
dmanrocks22
September 13, 2011 at 9:39am
Let's not forget about the 196.75 WHQL driver debacle... if those were approved drivers then I'd prefer to keep well away from the unstable beta ones.
chipmunkofdoom2
September 13, 2011 at 8:38am
Let's not forget the Nvidia driver "glitch" with the Star Craft II beta. IIRC, an Nvidia driver issue prevented the fan from spinning up on video cards while playing SC2. Many players had their cards fried with a RELEASE version driver. This type of thing usually doesn't happen with any drivers, beta or otherwise, but it's important to keep in mind that your game crashing and your computer restarting is hardly the worst thing a beta software (or driver) could do.
