AMD has now let loose the second beta version of the Catalyst 13.10 graphics driver. The Beta2 features support for Radeon HD 5000, HD 6000, and HD 7000 Series desktop cards and HD 5000M, HD 6000M, HD 7000M and 8000M Series mobile GPUs, and is available for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 systems. Download links are just below.

• AMD Catalyst 13.10 Beta2 for Windows
• AMD Mobility Catalyst 13.10 Beta2 for Windows (64-bit)
• AMD Mobility Catalyst 13.10 Beta2 for Windows (32-bit)

NVIDIA has just made available a new graphics driver, the beta-tagged GeForce 331.40 which includes support for the GeForce 8, 9, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, and 700-series desktop GPUs and the ION desktop GPUs. This new build is claimed to deliver a performance boost (compared to the GeForce 327.23 drivers) for the GeForce 400/500/600/700 Series GPUs and implements Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion plus (HBAO+) for DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 applications.

GeForce 331.40 Beta Download Links
Windows Vista/7/8/8.1 32bit / Windows Vista/7/8/8.1 64bit / Windows XP 32bit / Windows XP 64bit

AMD has now made available a new Catalyst driver, the 13.10 version for Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. This driver comes with a beta tag and supports the Radeon HD 7000, HD 6000 and HD 5000 Series cards. There's also a mobile version of 13.10 which supports the Mobility Radeon HD 8000M, HD 7000M, HD 6000M and HD 5000M cards. Download links are just below.

• AMD Catalyst 13.10 Beta
• AMD Mobility Catalyst 13.10 Beta

NVIDIA released some of the first WHQL-certified drivers for Windows 8.1 Preview, with its WHQL-signed GeForce drivers that are WDDM 1.3 compliant. Labeled GeForce 326.01 WHQL, these drivers cover all GeForce GPUs since 6-series, across desktop and notebook platforms separately (separate drivers for desktop and mobile GPUs). In its release notes, NVIDIA didn't list out any changes to the version from previous versions, but mentioned support for even the latest GeForce GTX 760 graphics card, so the support list is up to date.

DOWNLOAD: GeForce 326.01 WHQL for Windows 8.1 Release Preview

Today's driver release from NVIDIA, numbered 320.49 beta, comes in conjunction with the GeForce GTX 760 launch, adding support for the new card but also bringing a number of fixes for a series of issues reported with previews drivers. The release notes for the new drivers mention fixes addressing image corruption and artifacting for Eve Online: Retribution, Assassin's Creed III, Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. The drivers also add (or update) SLI support for a wide series of other titles, among which we find Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Natural Selection 2, Trackmania 2: Canyon and GRID 2. For download please visit the following page.

NVIDIA backed up its grand GeForce GTX 780 launch with GeForce 320.18 WHQL drivers, supporting all its modern GPUs. It's also being recommended as a 'day-of-launch' WHQL driver for the GTX 780. The driver introduces game-specific performance improvements for Tomb Raider (by up to 20%), DiRT Showdown (up to 20%), Metro: Last Light (up to 10%), Assassin's Creed III (up to 8%), Far Cry 3 (up to 6%), Bioshock: Infinite (up to 5%). The driver also addresses game-specific performance issues with Metro: Last Light, Dead Island: Riptide, D&D: Neverwinter, and Star Trek: The Videogame.

SLI profiles are added or improved for a number of titles, including Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Dead Island: Riptide, Dungeons & Dragons: Neverwinter, Euro Truck Simulator 2, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, GRID 2, Remember Me, Natural Selection 2, Resident Evil 6, and TrackMania² Canyon.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 320.18 WHQL for Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

AMD launched its first WHQL-signed Catalyst Software Suite in three months, with the Catalyst 13.4 WHQL, coinciding with the launch of Radeon HD 7990, earlier today. The Catalyst Software Suite installs device drivers and system software for AMD Radeon GPUs, IGPs, and integrated HDMI audio devices, in additional to AMD APP runtime environment, and certain media acceleration software.DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 13.4 WHQL for Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

The change-log for Catalyst 13.4 WHQL follows.

Hot on the heels of NVIDIA's GeForce 313.95 Beta drivers, AMD launched Catalyst 13.2 Beta, targeting EA's release of Crysis 3 multiplayer open-beta. The driver improves performance by up to 15 percent, but in highly specific scenarios, vaguely put by AMD as "in high MSAA cases." There is no general performance improvement announced, but that future Catalyst releases could address performance. Catalyst 13.2 Beta also addresses frame latency issues related to three titles, TES5: Skyrim, Boderlands 2, and Guild Wars 2. Single GPU performance for Devil May Cry is improved by up to 50 percent. CrossFire systems running Crysis 2 could see a 10 percent performance improvement. Lastly, a texture-flickering issue seen with DirectX 9.0c applications is resolved.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta

An [ethical?] hacker going by the Twitter handle @peterwintrsmith discovered a gaping security hole in NVIDIA's display driver service that allows ordinary local and remote users to gain administrator privileges in Windows. Mr. Winter-Smith posted a description and details of the exploit, in which he describes the NVIDIA Display Device server (NVVSVC) as listening on a pipe (a means by which different processes talk to each other) "\pipe\nsvr," which has an null/empty discretionary access control list (DACL, a security whitelist for users/groups), letting ordinary logged in local and remote users (firewall permitting, and the remote admin has a local account) to gain administrator rights to the system. In our opinion, the exploit is plausible, and could cut short winter breaks of a few in Santa Clara.

NVIDIA released the GeForce 310.70 WHQL software suite, which isn't much more than a WHQL-signed version of the GeForce 310.70 beta drivers posted a couple of weeks ago. Available for 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP, the drivers, much like the 310.70 beta, are a cumulative of several R310 beta releases from over the past two months. They add significant performance increases over the previous 306.97 WHQL drivers.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 310.70 WHQL for Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit, Windows XP 32-bit

AMD has now made available an updated version of its Catalyst 12.11 graphics drivers. Known as the Beta11, this latest release features all the goodies of previous Catalyst 12.11 Beta builds and brings improved performance in Far Cry 3 (up to 25% with 8xMSAA, SSAO enabled @ 1600p, and up to 15% with 8xMSAA, HDAO enabled @1600p) (the newly-released AMD Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 must also be installed)

To download the Catalyst 12.11 Beta 11 and Catalyst 12.11 CAP2 see this page.

After launching its high-performance display driver for Linux that boosts GeForce graphics performance by 100%, NVIDIA released an open-source 2D driver code for its Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SoCs, which is based on the experimental Direct Rendering Manager driver (DRM, not as in digital rights management). DRM was started as an independent project by Thierry Reding, but is now being worked on by NVIDIA, among others.

The open-source DRM driver code published by Terje Bergstrom today provide host1x and 2D on Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 SoCs, and was published by Terje Bergstrom. He writes "nvhost is the driver that controls host1x hardware. It supports host1x command channels, synchronization, run-time power management and memory management. It is sectioned into logical driver under drivers/video/tegra/host and physical driver under drivers/video/tegra/host/host1x. The physical driver is compiled with the hardware headers of the particular host1x version."

NVIDIA has today made available a new beta-tagged graphics driver, the GeForce 310.61 which is a small update from the GeForce 310.54 offering improved compatibility for PlanetSide 2 and Hitman: Absolution.

The GeForce 310.61 Beta supports GeForce 8, 9, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 and 600 Series cards and is available for Windows 7, 8 and Vista, in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.

NVIDIA today announced the latest NVIDIA GeForce drivers -- R310 -- double the performance and dramatically reduce game loading times for those gaming on the Linux operating system.

The result of almost a year of development by NVIDIA, Valve and other game developers, the new GeForce R310 drivers are designed to give GeForce customers the best possible Linux-based PC gaming experience -- and showcase the enormous potential of the world's biggest open-source operating system.

In wake of GeForce GTX 650 Ti launch, NVIDIA posted the latest WHQL-signed version of its GeForce software suite, version 306.97 WHQL. Recommended for Windows 8, the driver adds support for the newly-launched GPU, and is said to go well with Borderlands 2, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, and World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria. New performance and stability improvements are said to cover a variety of games. 3D Vision profiles were added or improved for a large number of games.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 306.97 WHQL (International) for Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit

With September drawing to a close AMD has rolled out a new graphics driver, the Catalyst 12.9 Beta which brings an improved Catalyst Control Center, support for the mobile-focused Enduro graphics switching technology, some fixes, and a 10% performance boost in Lost Planet 2 (for single-GPU setups).

Download: for Windows 8, Windows 7 & Windows Vista / for Windows 8, Windows 7 & Windows Vista (with .NET 4.0) / for Windows XP / for Linux

Following launches of its GeForce GTX 660 and GTX 650 graphics processors earlier this day, NVIDIA released the latest stable version of its GeForce driver suite. GeForce 306.23 WHQL was released for Windows 7/Vista and Windows XP. This is NVIDIA's first WHQL-signed driver launch after GeForce GTX 660 Ti was launched last month. Hence, it includes official support for GeForce GTX 660 Ti, GeForce GTX 660, and GeForce GTX 650. The company also notified that the next WHQL-signed drivers will remove support for legacy GeForce GPUs such as 6-series and 7-series.

GeForce 306.23 WHQL also adds GPU and game-specific performance improvements. Along with the latest patch by its developer, Total War: Shogun 2 will see up to 60% performance improvement with GeForce GTX 680. Performance is also significantly improved for games such as Batman: Arkham City, Dragon Age II, STALKER: Call of Pripyat, and Battlefield 3 (in SLI). SLI profiles were added or improved for a large number of games. The drivers provide early support for applications built with CUDA 5 Preview.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 306.23 WHQL for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit

A list of changes follows.

NVIDIA rolled out the first WHQL-certified GeForce drivers for Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 operating system. The company just released GeForce 302.82 WHQL for desktop GPUs running on Windows 8 Release Preview. Notebook GPU users, on the other hand, will have to wait a little longer, and continue using the GeForce 302.80, which has been out since 15th June. NVIDIA announced that it was working on dishing out the first WHQL-certified graphics drivers for Windows 8 since late May. Version 302.82 WHQL doesn't appear to come with a contingent of performance updates, at least not according to its release notes document. It's likely to be based on Release Driver 302, with the Microsoft WHQL certification for Windows 8. The driver is meant only for Windows 8, and shouldn't be used with Windows 7 or Vista.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 302.82 WHQL for Windows 8 64-bit and 32-bit

Although pre-launch drivers of the GeForce GTX 680 let the GPU run in PCI-Express Gen 3.0 mode on Intel's Sandy Bridge-E HEDT (X79) platforms, the release drivers limited the GPU to PCI-Express Gen 2.0 on the platform. The issue carried on with GeForce GTX 670, and other graphics cards with "Kepler" family of GPUs. NVIDIA cited reasons such as the platform not being PCI-Expres Gen 3.0 "certified" although it supports the 8 GT/s mode. The company assured users that it was working on getting its hardware to work on the Sandy Bridge-E HEDT platform in Gen 3.0 mode, and until it's absolutely certain about reliability, it is forcing PCI-Express Gen 2.0 mode.

NVIDIA released a patch that enables PCI-Express Gen 3.0 mode on Intel Sandy Bridge-E HEDT (X79) platforms, which lets graphics cards based on GeForce Kepler GPUs, such as GeForce GTX 680, GTX 670, etc., take advantage of 8 GT/s per lane system interface bandwidth. The mode could come particularly handy for graphics cards that are installed on electrical PCI-Express 3.0 x8 slots, as they could end up with bandwidth comparable to that of PCI-Express 2.0 x16. The patch should be installed along with the latest stable drivers. To enable the patch, run the executable and reboot the system. To undo the patch later, run the same executable with "-revert" argument in Command Prompt. Use only if stability is not absolutely paramount, or if the hardware is not operating in a mission-critical environment.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce Kepler PCIe 3.0 mode-enabling patch for Sandy Bridge-E systems

Intel released a new beta driver for processors with integrated graphics, for the Windows 8 Release Preview. Carrying the version number 15.28.0.64.2770, the driver supports Windows Display Driver Model Version 1.2 (WDDM 1.2), and enables features such as stereoscopic 3D, optimized screen rotation detection, and DirectX 11 (on select graphics controller models). It supports Intel HD Graphics 4000/3000/2500/2000 (Core "Sandy Bridge" and Core "Ivy Bridge"). Intel recommends use of its Windows 7 driver for reliability with OpenGL 3.3 applications.

DOWNLOAD: Intel HD Graphics Beta Driver for Windows 8 Release Preview

Santa Clara-based GPU designer NVIDIA Corp. has now made available the first WHQL-certified unified driver from the R300 family, the GeForce 301.42. This latest release includes the PhysX System Software v9.12.0213, the HD Audio v1.3.16.0 driver, and features support for the GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 and 600 Series desktop cards (including the recently-launched GeForce GTX 690 and GTX 670).

Windows 7/Vista 32-bit | Windows 7/Vista 64-bit | Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit

Intel released its first HD Graphics drivers for Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The drivers are Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 1.2 compliant, supports HD 4000 graphics, found in 3rd Generation Core processors, HD 3000 and HD 2000 graphics of 2nd Generation Core processors; complete with stereoscopic 3D, DirectX 11 (on compatible models), and flicker-free display rotation.DOWNLOAD: Intel HD Graphics Driver for Windows 8 Consumer Preview 64-bit, 32-bit

AMD has today let loose the newest Catalyst release, the WHQL-certified Catalyst 12.4 which includes the 8.961 graphics driver and features support for the Radeon HD 2000, HD 3000, HD 4000, HD 5000, HD 6000 and HD 7000 Series desktop cards.

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

Catalyst 12.4 Release Highlights

New Features

Windows XP support for the AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series
- In addition to Windows 7 and Windows Vista support, Catalyst 12.4 now also introduces Windows XP (64-bit/32-bit) support for the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series

Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing: Level of Detail (LOD) Image Quality enhancements
- Supported on the AMD Radeon HD 7900, AMD Radeon HD 7800, and AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series
- LOD Image quality enhancements have been improved when enabling Super Sample Anti-Aliasing and Adaptive Anti-Aliasing through the AMD Catalyst Control Center for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications.
- Applications must support in game Anti-Aliasing for the feature to work (Forced on Anti-Aliasing through the Catalyst Control Center is not supported for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 applications)

NVIDIA has today made available a new graphics drive, the beta-tagged GeForce 301.24 which includes support for the GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 Series cards, as well as for the GeForce GTX 680.

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

AMD has now made available this month's WHQL-certified set of Catalyst graphics drivers. The Catalyst 12.3 comes with support for the 28 nm-flavored Radeon HD 7900, HD 7800 and HD 7700 Series, as well as for the Radeon HD 6000, HD 5000, HD 4000, HD 3000 and HD 2000 models.

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