Nvidia, ATI Release New Drivers

News
By Kevin Parrish
published

Both Nvidia and ATI released new drivers over the past few days: Nvidia's GeForce 185.68 beta driver and ATI's Catalyst 9.4

Wednesday Nvidia quietly released a new GeForce beta driver, supporting the GeForce 9 series, 100 series, and the 200 series desktop GPUs. Now listed as v185.68 (98,9 MB), the only new feature the beta driver offers is optimized performance for the PC game The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Originally, v185 brought support for the new GeForce GTX 275 GPU and CUDA 2.2. The driver also gave many PC games a considerable performance boost including Crysis: Warhead (22-percent), Far Cry 2 (14-percent), and Mirror's Edge (45-percent). In addition, Nvidia added support for the GeForce Plus Power Pack #3 as well as provide numerous bug fixes.

Consumers interested in downloading the new v185.68 beta drivers can do so by hitting the links provided below:

Nvidia GeForce Driver 185.68 Beta: Windows XP (32bit) (64bit)

Nvidia GeForce Driver 185.68 Beta: Windows Vista (32bit) (64bit)

T

hursday AMD also released a new driver, Catalyst 9.4, just twenty-two days after the release of v9.3. In this release, AMD has included the new ATI Overdrive auto-tune application, a program that finds over-clocked engine and memory values for Radeon cards that support the ATI Overdrive feature (in this case, the Radeon HD 4000 series). The ATI Overdrive technology allows for safe overclocking by constantly monitoring the GPU temperature, ensuring that it always stays at a safe level. More additional info regarding ATI Overdrive can be found here.

Furthermore, the Catalyst 9.4 driver also addresses a few additional issues including a problem with flickering in World of Warcraft when Shadow is set to medium/high using ATI CrossFire configurations, full screen resolution problems above 1024 x 768 for specific HDMI displays, and many other issues.

"We work hard to deliver the best platform solutions that consist of CPU and GPU, said AMD senior manager of advanced marketing Ian McNaughton. "As the only company in the industry that can deliver both we have the unique opportunity to develop free software to optimize performance across AMD-based platforms. I don’t think we say enough about our gaming software."

To download the new Catalyst 9.4 drivers, head here.

Kevin Parrish
16 Comments Comment from the forums
  • wickedsnow
    Awesome!
    Reply
  • SirCrono
    Wow, those are some performance gains.
    Reply
  • kyeana
    when i tested it, the new ati overdrive tool clocked my 4850 to high, resulting in a blue screen
    Reply
  • warezme
    what about that ambient occlussion thing? I thought that was new. I tried it on Farcry 2 with dual 295's and it looked incredibly good but the next time I tried to run it all I got was a jigsaw of black squares with the scene appearing and disappearing underneath? It was odd. I turned it off and all was well. My 295's are OC'ed to 285 spec's though so that may be part of the issue.
    Reply
  • scooterlibby
    Warezme I got the same issue when I put AO up to high with FC2 using two GTX260's. I believe you don't get to choose the level of AO on the new drivers, so maybe it is solved.

    Tom's, why do you list the claimed performance boosts without testing them? Why parrot these claims when they rarely stand up to any scrutiny? At least don't parrot the driver claims like they are known facts. Sloppy cut and paste press release masquerading as a news item.
    Reply
  • IzzyCraft
    Mirror's Edge (45-percent).
    lol i sometimes wonder what set ups they are using to get these percentages
    Reply
  • thedipper
    Well, it's not like they're increasing performance beyond a well-optimized state.

    The reason they get huge performance gains from drivers is because the previous driver was causing slowdown with that engine.
    Reply
  • antemon
    linux drivers?

    :(
    Reply
  • hemelskonijn
    The new ATI drivers did not fix the frame-drop problem some of us (me and some friends) have with the HD3650 graphics cards.
    Though the systems we use differ a lot from each other we all seem to have lag-ish effects while both ping and fps are more then ok.

    In my case switching to the desktop and back seems to work though.
    Reply
  • ooo
    Does it work with the 8800 series ?
    Reply