New Nvidia drivers promise increased performance for all 6, 7, 8, 9 series cards.

[Capitalizt]

I don't know what Nvidia did, but these new drivers totally kick ass...gave me an extra 6FPS in Call of Duty 4 on my old 7900GT. It was running 25 FPS...now it's a silky smooth 30-31 Bioshock is even smoother...pure awesomeness. Spread the joy.

Link: http://clanbase.ggl.com/news.php?nid=298354

[darthbudge]

Sweet, I will have to give these a try.

[greydemise]

sure why not, lets upgrade this mofo!

[munch]

I just got it and am about to install.

[supraazn]

Alright lets see what this does for my ancient 7600gt.

[tokitoki50]

8600M GT for my laptop isn't supported, lame.

[Demolition Man]

Thanks for the info. Hopefully this will improve my performance on my 8600GTS & Media Portal. :D

[help1]

Tag. I hope this can help my 7800GT.

[munch]

I just did a test with FEAR. I'm running a 8800GT and a e6420 (2.13 GHz)

Before update/after

Min: 20/19
Avg: 28/28
Max: 78 (odd)/36

Below 25 FPS: 22%/12%
Between 25 and 40 FPS: 40%/88%
Above 40 FPS: 1%/0%

So, take that for what it's worth.

[cletus]

I have a 6800GS. Should I even bother?

[hiccupleftovers]

Is this good for a 8600GS I'm running on my laptop now? Anyway to auto update them or am I going to have to try and manually install them myself?

[VioletArrows]

I'm probably going to have to wait until Dell repackages it. XP I've tried drivers straight off the website before and it was sort of a disaster.

[Bezerker]

Updated my 8600GS and now I cant play Gametap. Says I need to add Hardware Acceleration, but the Display settings says the driver doesn't allow for H.A....

[BigPopov]

8600M GT for my laptop isn't supported, lame.

nVidia practically denies that laptop graphics cards exists for all but the current series. It's disgusting.

I have a Inspiron 9300 with a 6800 Go, which they've never supported. Machine kicks ass overall though.

I'm glad ATI is kicking thier ass nowadays.

[Chacrana]

I'm excited to try this out and see what it can do. Apparently, the 180.xx driver is supposed to offer an even bigger speed boost among other things.

[Kaijufan]

Thanks OP I downloaded this the other day but I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. I'll try to get in some more Neverwinter Nights 2 MotB soon.

[SoulProphet]

tried the new drivers. It boasts better framerates but all i got was the nv4_disp.dll error on Steam games and Titan Quest.

The graphics cards i tried it on were the 6600 and 7600GS. Both displayed artifacts and tearing for all the games i had installed. I thought my cards were dying. I even had gotten a RMA number from BFGTech.

I had to revert back to the second recent drivers and now everything runs smoothly.

BEWARE OF THE NEW DRIVERS!!! IF YOU HAVE PROBLEMS JUST REVERT BACK TO THE DRIVERS YOU WERE USING BEFORE!!!

[Kaijufan]

I have an 8800 GTS and I didn't have any problems with TF2 tonight.

[Moxio]

Didn't do too much for me, but I guess I saw a little improvement.

[hankmecrankme]

It kicked GRID into high gear on my eVGA 8800GT KO. Game flies now. I definitely recommend this driver.

Also did a nice job getting Crysis Warhead to run better too.

[darthbudge]

Didn't really notice much difference on my 7600GT, but as I play more games we will see. Never hurts to update your drivers though.

[Razzuel]

I think my frame rates in Crysis Warhead dropped a bit after installing these new drivers.

[ninja dog]

all driver updates give performance increases for certain games...

[BigPopov]

If you're having problems with the new drivers, make sure you totally clean out the old video drivers before you install the new drivers. Google search it,

Basically, uninstall current drivers, run program to clean up, install new drivers.

Conflicts happen sometimes, it's fixed some quirks of mine in the past.

[DarkNessBear]

7600GT here. The new drivers help a lot, before on HIGH graphics in Warhammer i'd be stuttering everywhere I go, now I get like 20fps outside of towns and 10-15 fps in towns. Pretty fricken awesome! Thanks!

[ninja dog]

Haven't played any games yet, but I must say I hate how my screen settings get fucked up every time I update drivers. and now digital vibrance doesn't seem to have any effect at all, so I had to readjust both my monitor and nvidia settings (and it only moves at 33% increments or something.)

This is just a general complaint...don't know how games are affected yet.

[Over easy]

Hmm. I may just download this and try it out. If successful, I'll start playing my copy of Warhammer.

[suko_32]

According the DMC4's performance test, it did indeed improve the performance. Thanks!

[Chacrana]

By how much did it improve your performance in DMC4?

[suko_32]

About 2-5 frames a second.

[captainfrizo]

Interesting. I'll run some tests on Crysis and World at War before and after the driver update. At the moment though I'm in the middle of installing everything back onto the PC from a reformat. Once I get the games installed back on I'll post the results before and after driver updates. I'm running a 8800GTS (G92) in case anyone's curious.

[Hostile]

It screws up ATITool and I need it to underclock my video card to run properly for video games. I had to go back to the old one.

[Lone_Prodigy]

Coincidentally, the last time I updated my drivers my video card died. So I'm probably not trying again for awhile.

[captainfrizo]

I ran some benchmarks before and after updating the driver and it does seem that the new driver increases performance after all.

Here's the specs of my PC:
Vista Home Premium 32 bit
Q6600 Core 2 Quad @ 2.4GHz
4GB DDR 2 800 (Vista for whatever reason is showing all 4GB instead of 3.25)
MSI 8800GTS (G92 w/overclocking, running at default speeds)
Sound Blaster X-Fi Sound Card

Here's the benchmarks from 3D Mark and some games:

3D Mark Vantage

Previous driver GPU score: 4703
New driver GPU score: 5734

Company of Heroes
1680x1050 w/all settings on High or Ultimate

Previous driver - Avg: 114.2 FPS
New driver - Avg: 120.2 FPS

Crysis
1680x1050, No AA, all settings on High, DX10

Previous driver - Avg: 28.655 FPS
New driver - Avg: 30.535 FPS

World in Conflict
1680x1050, all settings on Very High

Previous driver - Avg: 23 FPS
New driver - Avg: 24 FPS

After running four tests I think it's safe to say that you will notice performance increases (at least if your card or configuration is somewhat like mine).

Now I'm going to play around with the overclocking on my 8800GTS a bit and see how much better these scores can improve from there.

[Serik]

What's the best way to uninstall drivers before installing new ones? NVIDIA's website says to just do it through Add/Remove programs...does that really get "everything"?

[captainfrizo]

What's the best way to uninstall drivers before installing new ones? NVIDIA's website says to just do it through Add/Remove programs...does that really get "everything"?

There's a couple of nVidia "driver cleaners" out there, but you can also do it through the device manager. For whatever reason Vista automatically reverted back to the old drivers when i uninstalled them (which would be reason to use a dedicated program, I used one a while back but the name escapes me), but when I tried to just install the new driver over the old it worked without a problem.

[Chacrana]

Apparently, the newly released 178.15 drivers offer even more of a speed boost than the 178.13 drivers did from whatever the previous version was. Which is pretty damn impressive. Haven't tried these myself yet, though.

[Moxio]

Srsly? Dayng.

[Chacrana]

Nvidia's site doesn't have them up yet (I don't think), but guru3d does:

http://downloads.guru3d.com/GeForce-ForceWare-178.15-Vista-64-bit-download-2083.html

[ninja dog]

great, just when I get my display back to normal. Oh well

edit: nevermind, 178.15 is Vista only.

[darthbudge]

Hmm, I am downloading those new drivers now. For some reason 178.13 kept crashing and then recovering on me, which wasn't that big of a deal but it was kinda annoying.

[Chacrana]

great, just when I get my display back to normal. Oh well

edit: nevermind, 178.15 is Vista only.

Guess again, Dweebenheimer

http://downloads.guru3d.com/GeForce-ForceWare-178.15-XP-32-bit-download-2087.html

[Moxio]

What's a Dweebenheimer?

[Chacrana]

http://hg101.classicgaming.gamespy.com/kof/kof98-quote1.png

[Moxio]

Nice.

[VipFREAK]

I don't do gaming anymore, but I got it anyway. I haven't noticed anythign really yet.

[ninja dog]

Guess again, Dweebenheimer

http://downloads.guru3d.com/GeForce-ForceWare-178.15-XP-32-bit-download-2087.html

It wasn't there before.

Whatever. I can survive anything...even nukes!

[Chacrana]

No you can't!

But yea, the XP drivers weren't up until yesterday.