Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA has just announced the introduction of its new BETA version of the upcoming GeForce/ION drive release. Designed to provide users with support for NVIDIA's latest series of GeForce GPUs, from the 6-series to the more recent 200-series, the new 186.08 Driver release will also include a new version of the chip maker's PhysX System Software. In addition, as with most new driver releases, the latest version is also meant to fix a series of known bugs, so there's a good chance that the various issues you have encountered with your GeForce products have been fixed.

 

According to the release notes of the new drivers, users upgrading to this BETA release will be able to take advantage of the new PhysX System Software version 9.09.0428. In addition, the new release will deliver 'numerous' bug fixes, which means users will be able to benefit from a smoother and higher-quality visual experience, using NVIDIA's GeForce and ION products. As with other driver releases, the new BETA version adds support for the following series of GPUs: GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, and 200-series desktop GPUs and ION graphics processing units.

 

Users will also see some performance improvements in comparison to the previous version of drivers, release 182. Such performance increments include:

 

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

 

The drivers are available now for download, following the links below:

 

NVIDIA GeForce Release 186.08 BETA drivers for Windows XP 32-bit

NVIDIA GeForce Release 186.08 BETA drivers for Windows XP 64-bit

NVIDIA GeForce Release 186.08 BETA drivers for Windows Vista 32-bit

NVIDIA GeForce Release 186.08 BETA drivers for Windows Vista 64-bit

NVIDIA GeForce Release 186.08 BETA drivers for Windows 7 32-bit

NVIDIA GeForce Release 186.08 BETA drivers for Windows 7 64-bit