Jul 29, 2011 14:58 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA has just rolled out the first public release of a 280-series graphics card driver, which brings SLI support to a series of new platforms and is compatible with all of the company's GPUs starting with the GeForce 6000-series.

Before taking a look at the changes introduced by Nvidia in this new release, it's important to note that the XP and Vista/7 branches are different, as the latter now includes the 3D Vision Controller driver (280.10).

3D Vision is not supported under Windows XP, so all the features related to this technology that have been added to the Vista/7 branch are not available under XP.

Some of the most important changes brought to 3DVision include support for 3DVisionLive.com and YouTube 3D with NVIDIA SLI computers, a windows mode for the 3D Vision Video Player and support for various 3DVision-enabled processors.

These are also accompanied by a slew of new 3DVsion profiles for a large list of games, as well as by profile updates for Crysis 2, Deep Black and Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition.

On the graphics card driver side, the most important update brought by 280.19 beta is the SLI support for AMD 990FX, 990X, and 970 motherboards.

The rest of the changelog includes various bug fixes, ranging from PhysX problems and "Out of Memory" error messages on GeForce 400 series graphics cards to various SLI performance improvements.

As usual, this driver package supports GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500-series desktop GPUs as well as ION desktop GPUs.

The NVIDIA GeForce 280.19 beta graphics driver can be downloaded from Softpedia by using the following links. Please download the version that corresponds to your operating system.

Nvidia GeForce Display Driver 280.19 Beta for XP

Nvidia GeForce Display Driver 280.19 Beta for XP64

Nvidia GeForce Display Driver 280.19 Beta for Vista, Win7

Nvidia GeForce Display Driver 280.19 Beta for Vista64, Win7 x64