New Nvidia Drivers Improve Performance in RAGE, BF3
New drivers provided by Nvidia are optimized for RAGE, Battlefield 3 and the new Batman title, Arkham City.
Monday Nvidia announced the release of its new GeForce 285.62 WHQL drivers that reportedly offer performance improvements in Battlefield 3, RAGE and Batman: Arkham City. The new drivers also bundle together all the enhancements and updates contained within the 285.27 and 285.38 beta releases, in addition to new SLI and 3D Vision profiles for many of today’s most popular games.
"For Battlefield 3 we’ve improved performance by up to 11-percent since the release of the GeForce 285.38 beta drivers, have included several compatibility enhancements, a new and improved SLI profile, and a 3D Vision profile," the company said. "Similarly, RAGE has received enhancements since the release of the same drivers, and Batman: Arkham City compatibility has been implemented."
In addition to a long list of improvements, Nvidia said that the driver timeouts experienced with the R285 beta drivers have been fixed, and that World of Warcraft players using an SLI system will no longer experience a flickering death. On Optimus notebooks, a Halo 2 crash has been rectified, as has an audio error that occurred when switching between 1080p and 480p resolutions.
"Updates contained within the earlier beta drivers have been carried over, such as the many performance improvements made to games --between the release of the 280.26 WHQL drivers and today’s 285.62 WHQL drivers-- when running on our entire range of 500-Series graphics cards," Nvidia said.
Gamers using a GeForce GTX 580 should see a 13-percent performance boost in Metro 2033, 8-percent in STALKER: Call of Pripyat, 7-percent in Civilization V, 5-percent in Crysis 2 with the DirectX 11 Ultra Update enabled, and more. GeForce GTX 560 users should see a 11-percent performance jump in STALKER but a mere 7-percent boost in Metro 2033.
To see Nvidia's long list of performance gains, head here.

Misleading headlines.
We are much more interested in minimum performance gain in fps.
What about the most popular cards, such as, GTX 460?
Please provide useful information when you were to announce such a performance improvement, nVidia.
2nd month ( +10% perfomance ) = metro 2033 27fps
3rd month ( +10% perfomance ) = metro 29-30fps
and so on....
The focus of the test will be to see if performance boost listed for newer cards will also translate to performance boost for older cards.
This information currently is non existent or very hard to find.
@1080p, DX11 everything on, no physX.....that's like ? 3fps
stop hating because I remember when you wanted to swap your HD 6950 for a GTX 560
a few months ago...
try running a game with the 'eye-candy' PhysX enabled with that Radeon card.
watch those frames drop then...
me personally run SLi GTX 460 Hawks @ 3840 x 1024 landscape resolution.
wicked...
ATI is good, but there is no question Nvidia has better drivers. The ATI driver interface looks like something from the early 90's. Everything is hidden under some clunky menu, if it even works.
Not hating on ATI, but as a guy who used Nvidia for close to 10 years and then switched, I think Nvidia has superior driver software.
It's nice that issues were addressed, but why would anyone enable SLI for WoW it's about as taxing on a graphics subsystem as Tetris?
To bad I already finished the game at a measly 1920x1080 and I am no longer interested in it.
Yeah, I couldn't get on this morning either..
Single player is pretty cool though.. Want to try coop
I think you have not played WoW for quite some time. The new patches and zones (and I mean relatively new, not even latest expansion new), do tax the graphical system at high resolutions, longest view ranges and so on.
I want to compare them with these myself.
RAGE should be fun but after it hits the bargain bin. Will pay full price for SkyRim if it does not have issues at release like RAGE had.