Nvidia 260.63 Beta Driver Offers Improved Install
A more friendly way to install drivers.
Along with the launch of the GeForce GTS 450, Nvidia also pushed out a new beta driver release.
While the key point of the new driver is that it supports the GTS 450, there are also some performance enhancements for the other members of the Fermi family.
Notably, the maximum gains over the v258.96 drivers are:
GeForce GTX 480:
- Up to 10% in StarCraft II (2560x1600 4xAA/16xAF Ultra)
- Up to 14% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF)
- Up to 16% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (SLI – 2560x1600 4xAA/16xAF)
- Up to 6% in Aliens vs. Predator (SLI – 1920x1200 noAA – Tessellation on)
GeForce GTX 460:
- Up to 19% in StarCraft II (SLI – 1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF Ultra)
- Up to 15% in Battlefield Bad Company 2 (SLI – 2560x1600 4xAA/16xAF)
- Up to 12% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (2560x1600 noAA)
- Up to 9% in Aliens vs. Predator (1680x1050 4xAA/16xAF – Tessellation on)
- Up to 7% in Metro 2033 (1680x1050 noAA – Tessellation on)
- Up to 11% in Dirt 2 (SLI – 2560x1600 4xAA/16xAF)
- Up to 12% in Crysis:Warhead (SLI – 1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF Gamer)
- Up to 13% in Far Cry 2 (2560x1600 4xAA/16xAF)
- Up to 12% in H.A.W.X (SLI – 1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF SSAO Very High)
- Up to 5% in Just Cause 2 (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF)
- Up to 22% in Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (1920x1200 noAA)
- Up to 5% in 3DMark Vantage (Extreme Preset)
Another new pleasing change is an overhauled install UI. As Nvidia explains on its blog:
"For over a year now, our installer team has been working on a complete redesign of the driver install experience and, with Release 260, we are excited to roll out the first phase of that redesign. Users will have the choice of a one-click express installation or a custom installation with new advanced capability. Specifically, the custom install options allow users to choose which driver components to install, including PhysX, 3D Vision and more. Also, for the advanced users that prefer to uninstall their older driver first, or rely on 3rd party driver cleaner software to completely remove older drivers, NVIDIA Install offers the choice of a clean install. During the clean install process, your older driver is completely removed from your system before seamlessly installing the new driver. Users will also notice that NVIDIA Install is faster, especially in the case of systems with multiple GPUs."

The GTX480/470 are very similar, in that they're both based on gf100. I would think that the GTX470 would experience similar performance gains.
They were not removing drivers from the system at all so they could not "screw up" the system. More over, I understand that technology purist would say "always uninstall old drivers first", but if you system does not have any problems, THERE IS NO NEED of doing that, not with NVIDIA drivers (not sure about ATI). I never had any issues just to run their drivers, they install quite fine without uninstalation of the old drivers. And judging by boards NVIDIA drivers are usually superior in quality and have less problems than ATI drivers.
A lot of similar (theoretical) performance increases were seen in the first few releases of ATI's 10.x drivers as well. When every new driver release somehow increases performance (again) by 5-15%, it starts to look a little odd.
That's hitting below the belt there given that ati's well known for having the worst driver support of..well pretty much any pc component.