Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA has recently introduced a new series of GeForce graphics drivers with a new Beta release of their 185 series. The new release offers support for all of the company's latest graphics accelerators, including the most recent GeForce GTX 275, as well as other previously-released GeForce cards, part of NVIDIA's GeForce 6, 7, 8 and 9-series of desktop GPUs. In addition, according to the release notes of the new GeForce drivers, users of NVIDIA graphics accelerators will be able to take advantage of a series of performance increases.

 

The company's new GeForce Driver release 185.81 Beta includes support for its latest GeForce GTX 275 graphics processing unit, as well as a number of new features. According to the release notes, users upgrading their drivers to the latest beta release will be provided with support for Ambient Occlusion, a new setting in the NVIDIA Control Panel, CUDA 2.2, for better performance in GPU-enabled applications, and expanded support in the NVIDIA Video Encoding library for GPUs that use less than 32 cores.

 

In addition, the new driver release provides performance increases for a number of 3D applications, including some of the latest gaming titles. These performance increases should be observed when compared to NVIDIA's older GeForce drivers, release 182.

 

Up to 25% performance increase in The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

Up to 22% performance increase in Crysis: Warhead with antialiasing enabled

Up to 11% performance increase in Fallout 3 with antialiasing enabled

Up to 14% performance increase in Far Cry 2

Up to 30% performance increase in Half-Life 2 engine games with 3-way and 4-way SLI

Up to 45% performance increase in Mirror’s Edge with antialiasing enabled

 

For those who want to download the latest GeForce release 185.81 Beta, you can do so right here at Softpedia, following the links below:

 

NVIDIA GeForce Release 185.81 Beta drivers for Windows XP 32-bit

NVIDIA GeForce Release 185.81 Beta drivers for Windows XP 64-bit

NVIDIA GeForce Release 185.81 Beta drivers for Windows Vista 32-bit

NVIDIA GeForce Release 185.81 Beta drivers for Windows Vista 64-bit

NVIDIA GeForce Release 185.81 Beta drivers for Windows 7 32-bit

NVIDIA GeForce Release 185.81 Beta drivers for Windows 7 64-bit