Vista - New Forceware 180.48 Drivers, Claims up to 80% Improvement

Written by Paul Lilly 1/20/08 at 12:30:55 PM


Nvidia has released new WHQL-certified videocards driver for GeForce 200-series, 9-series, and 8800-series GPUs only (owners of older videocards need not apply). The approximately 73MB download enables finally brings to fruition a license agreement between Nvidia and Intel by enabling SLI on SLI-certified Intel X58-based motherboards. The new driver also supports multi-monitor support in an SLI-configuration, which previously had only been available with beta drivers. PhysX acceleration is also enabled when installing the new driver.

On the gaming front, Nvidia claims double-digit percentage performance gains in a number of titles, including a giant 80 percent boost in Lost Planet: Colonies. Far Cry 2 is the other big beneficiary with a purported 38 percent performance gain. Devil May Cry 4, Assassin's Creed, BioShock, Comapny of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, Crysis Warhead, Race Driver: GRID, and World of Conflict all receive performance gains ranging from 10 percent to 25 percent, according to Nvidia. And for you benchmarking gurus, 3DMark Vantage's performance preset should perform 10 percent better as well.

For NVIDIA driver download: Latest NVIDIA ForceWare Video Drivers


Source: New Forceware 180.48 Drivers Released, Claims up to 80% Improvement, Enables SLI Multi-Monitor Support | Maximum PC

Interesting, thanks for the heads up!

You're welcome Slimy.

Don't know about 80%, but I've seen an improvement for sure playing Far Cry II.

I am going to test this out in both Mass Effect and Fallout 3 and let you know - my holidays start in less than 24 hours!!!

BTW, x64 DL is just shy of 91 MB....

Looks like I am going to be a bit busy tonight.
Cheers for the link Brink.

John and Roy, please post back your results.

Have fun.

Well Brink is the man when it comes to things like this. I found it while re-building my Vista install yesterday and upgradeing my RAM and adding a 4GB ready boost drive.

So its hard to tell where all my performance gains are all comeing from.

I doubled my RAM. Sooo that and the new ready boost and all the other updated drivers I picked up(intel had new inf drivers up) I AM SMOKING HERE.

This thing opens stuff before I can even click it.

But I did notice a couple of nvidia improvements. The cursor is back in the password box when I start the system, I used to have to place it there after every start up. I have been running dual monitors for years, never had any problems there.

Vista has always booted great. Puts a MAC to shame!

My 9800 likes.

Thanks always Brink

I don't like them.

My favorite game is 1942. Usually drivers are just too fast for the game, if that makes any sense, so I just enable some candy in the driver CP and the game runs like glass; however, no matter what I did the drivers seem sticky, unpolished. I tried no AF, 4xAF, 4xAF with 2xAA/4xAA. 8xAF, 8xAF with 2xAA/4xAA... no combination of candy would make 42 run smoothly, which was odd considering these things are supposed to be 80% faster?

I thought it might be the game, or the server, so I tried CoD4... same thing. The odd thing is that single player stuff runs just fine, nice and smooth... but... SP is not my thing.


***EDIT***

Ok, the magic number now seems to be 16x. I guess they are faster? Too tired to play anymore today (who said that!), so I'll try some more games tomorrow.