NVIDIA Releases the GeForce 295.73 WHQL-certified Drivers

[Cristian_25H]

NVIDIA Corp. has now made available the first WHQL driver of the R295 family, the GeForce 295.73. This release comes with support for GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 Series cards, and for ION GPUs, it's bundled with the PhysX System Software v9.12.0209, and features the following highlights:

- Game-changing performance boost of up to 45% in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, "the fastest selling title in Steam's history"
- Up to 2x performance Mass Effect 3 with SLI technology.
- 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.

Download: Windows 7/Vista (32-bit) / Windows 7/Vista (64-bit) / Windows XP (32-bit) / Windows XP (64-bit)



Full changelog:

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.
- Updates the ambient occlusion support for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to a higher performance profile (also in 290 beta drivers).
- Adds ambient occlusion support for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (also in 290 beta drivers).

NVIDIA SLI

- Adds or updates SLI profiles for:

Mass Effect 3
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
The Darkness II
F1 2011
Oil Rush
Red Faction: Armageddon
7554
Trine 2
WRC 2: FIA World Rally Championship 2011
Afterfall: InSanity.
ArcheAge
Core Blaze

NVIDIA 3D Vision

- Adds support for 3D Vision windowed mode on DLP HDTVs and on Optimized for GeForce passive 3D monitors.
- Added new 3D Vision laser sight /crosshair options to better match Skyrim crosshairs.
- Adds or updates 3D Vision profiles for:

The Adventures of Tintin - rated Good
Afterfall: Insanity - rated Fair
ANNO 2070 - rated Not Recommended
Apache: Air Assault - rated Fair
Black Prophecy - rated Not Recommended
Chaos Online - rated Fair
Choplifter HD - rated Good
Cities XL 2012 - rated Good
Da Vinci Online - rated Fair
Dino D-Day - rated Good
DotA 2 - rating upgraded to Fair
Dungeon and Dragons: Daggerdale - rated Fair
Edge - rated Excellent
Ferrari Project - rated Not Recommended
The First Templar - rated Fair
Fractal - rated Excellent
FreeStyle 2 - rated Good
The Haunted Halls Reach - rated Excellent
Insane 2 - rated Excellent
King Arthur II - rated Not Recommended
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning - rated Fair
Kong Fu Ying Xiong - rated Fair
Love Beat - rated Good
Marvel Super Hero Squad Online - rated Good
Microsoft Flight - rated Fair
Perpetuum - rated Fair
Post Apocalyptic Mayhem - rated Fair
Prototype 2 - rated Fair
Q.U.B.E. - rated Excellent
Quan Qiu Shi Ming - rated Excellent
Red Bull X-Fighters - rated Excellent
rFactor 2 (mod mode) - rated Good and updated convergence
Risen 2: Dark Waters - rated Fair
Saints Row: The Third - Rated Not Recommended
Shadow Company: Left for Dead - rated Not Recommended
Special Force - Rated Good
Tera - rated Good
Top Gun: Hard Lock - rated Not Recommended
Tropico 4 - rated Good
Worms Blast - rated Good

NVIDIA PhysX

- Updates PhysX System Software to 9.12.0209 for improved compatibility with Alice: Madness Returns and Batman: Arkham City.

NVIDIA Surround

- Enables WHQL-certified support for NVIDIA Surround on Intel X79 SLI-certified motherboards.

HD Audio

- Updates HD Audio to version 1.3.12.0.

Battlefield 3

- Fixes instances of texture corruption/artifacts in Battlefield 3 when memory constrained (typically 1 GB or less graphics cards running Ultra settings and high resolutions).

Other Details

- Supports multiple languages and APIs for GPU computing: CUDA C, CUDA C++, CUDA Fortran, OpenCL, DirectCompute, and Microsoft C++ AMP.
- Supports single GPU and NVIDIA SLI technology on DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11, and OpenGL, including 3-way SLI, Quad SLI, and SLI support on SLI-certified Intel and AMD motherboards.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Mistral]

Mad props to nVidia. They write their driver press releases much better than AMD does.

 

[claylomax]

First WHQL Drivers since 24 October 2011; as long as they're solid like the last ones I don't care how long they take.

 

[ViperXTR]

still no official word about framerate limit and FXAA? Its been on the drivers many months back (enabled through nVidia Inspector)

 

[entropy13]

1 hour, it would apparently take me one hour. Who's slower than me?

EDIT: LOL suddenly slowed down to 2 hours.

 

[Cheeseball]

Runs fine on my CUDA-assigned GTX 560 and my laptop's (Verde) GT 540M.

 

[ZoneDymo]

Mad props to nVidia. They write their driver press releases much better than AMD does.

How do you mean that?
Are you talking about timing? or what they say the driver does? or what the driver actually does? or what?

Also, "- 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)."

Man those older drivers must have sucked hard if you can get such a performance jump out of new drivers, still great they got it right now but damn :S

 

[MicroUnC]

It's about time!

 

[entropy13]

How do you mean that?
Are you talking about timing? or what they say the driver does? or what the driver actually does? or what?

Also, "- 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)."

Man those older drivers must have sucked hard if you can get such a performance jump out of new drivers, still great they got it right now but damn :S

They "sucked so hard" that those drivers, at that time, enables a GTX 560 playable framerates which are higher than what an HD 6970 gets. Going from 280.26 to 285.62 brought almost the same increase in fps performance too, so if they could still get 45% more from that, wow. I doubt it, though. It's the best-case scenario for obvious reasons, hence the "up to" preceding the percentage.

Anyway it's more on the fact that during that time the Nvidia drivers were better than the AMD drivers for Skyrim, rather than the drivers being automatically "great."

 

[ZoneDymo]

They "sucked so hard" that those drivers, at that time, enables a GTX 560 playable framerates which are higher than what an HD 6970 gets. Going from 280.26 to 285.62 brought almost the same increase in fps performance too, so if they could still get 45% more from that, wow. I doubt it, though. It's the best-case scenario for obvious reasons, hence the "up to" preceding the percentage.

Anyway it's more on the fact that during that time the Nvidia drivers were better than the AMD drivers for Skyrim, rather than the drivers being automatically "great."

Im sorry, who was talking about AMD?
We are talking about Nvidia drivers vs Nvidia drivers.
I guess the big thing we can get out of this is Nvidia comes with its percentage encreases by comparing new drivers with drivers released 5 drivers prior.
Which imo is off.

 

[entropy13]

Im sorry, who was talking about AMD?

Obviously me, duh.

I mentioned AMD because of your statement: "Man those older drivers must have sucked hard if you can get such a performance jump out of new drivers", which obviously implies that 285.62 "sucked hard", I therefore added that even assuming that you are correct, that 285.62 "sucked hard", it wasn't "enough" to be worse than AMD's drivers at that time. Additionally, I also mention the actual performance increase from the previous beta to that older WHQL drivers. Which was already quite significant, making the promised performance increase between the two WHQL drivers quite optimistic.

Unless of course you have such high standards that the performance increase between the older WHQL driver and it's preceding beta driver still constitutes something that "sucked so hard."

We are talking about Nvidia drivers vs Nvidia drivers.

Which I also did, unless the phrase "Going from 280.26 to 285.62" doesn't exist in my post.

I guess the big thing we can get out of this is Nvidia comes with its percentage encreases by comparing new drivers with drivers released 5 drivers prior.
Which imo is off.

And which I've also addressed, since going to THAT older WHQL driver from the previous beta already brought much performance increases already, which makes this more recent one quite unlikely to happen.

 

[Kaynar]

I cant believe that SSAO will be an nVidia exclusive feature for Diablo 3. Not to mention that SSAO is available for Skyrim throught addons for both nVidia and AMD in a top-quality setting.

 

[Arctucas]

Still broken for me, driver is missing after reboot.

 

[brandonwh64]

increases for 560TI! ok im installing!

I have a question though. I have been on ATI/AMD GPUs for a while, Do I have to do a full driver sweeper to install this new driver?

 

[JrRacinFan]

So far so good. Thank you NV. Oh also, I noticed they added more options to NV Surround in the new drivers for my cards YAY!

@Brandon you have option for clean install if you choose advanced. I do it everytime anyways and never EVER had issues with the drivers.

 

[brandonwh64]

So far so good. Thank you NV. Oh also, I noticed they added more options to NV Surround in the new drivers for my cards YAY!

@Brandon you have option for clean install if you choose advanced. I do it everytime anyways and never EVER had issues with the drivers.

OK I will update my main right now

 

[Yo_Wattup]

Nvidia driver release: *gives exact details and how much of a performance gain you should expect and in which games*

AMD driver release: "ahhhhhh okay guys,.. try and see if this fixes some stuff.... it still won't run our latest cards but it might fix... some.. thing... maybe..."

 

[xenocide]

Nvidia driver release: *gives exact details and how much of a performance gain you should expect and in which games*

AMD driver release: "ahhhhhh okay guys,.. try and see if this fixes some stuff.... it still won't run our latest cards but it might fix... some.. thing... maybe..."

I like to imagine AMD Driver releases installing with the Benny Hill Theme playing...

 

[TheMailMan78]

So far so good. Thank you NV. Oh also, I noticed they added more options to NV Surround in the new drivers for my cards YAY!

@Brandon you have option for clean install if you choose advanced. I do it everytime anyways and never EVER had issues with the drivers.

I do the Erocker method. Seems to work well.

 

[EnergyFX]

1 hour, it would apparently take me one hour. Who's slower than me?

EDIT: LOL suddenly slowed down to 2 hours.

so the answer to your question... you.

 

[NC37]

Zomg! New drivers!! NV does still exist!!

 

[xxdozer32]

quick download and installation for me

 

[GC_PaNzerFIN]

Seems to work pretty well, but Quality AO+8xCSAA+16xAF really pushes the GTX 460 I have in D3. I guess there could be some benefit had from upgrade.

 

[Halk]

Has anyone noticed tangible increases in Skyrim performance to match the claims in the release notes?

I'm curious if where Skyrim is CPU limited if there would be any increase. I would expect not, not unless the driver is now able to offload more from the CPU... the intricate workings of graphics drivers are beyond my comprehension.

If my setup determines the answer then I'm running a 1090t, and a 580 - and as I understand it I would expect to be CPU limited at present.

 

[LifeOnMars]

As a heads up there is also a physx driver that supercedes the one included with these drivers.

Physx 9.12.0213 has been put up on Guru 3D.