Jan 18, 2011 19:01 GMT  ·  By

After releasing the 266.35 Beta drivers back in early January, NVIDIA thought that it would be a good idea to also make available for download a new WHQL version of the new 265 series of drivers, namely 266.58 WHQL, targeting computing systems equipped with GeForce/ION components. The new driver release supports GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500-series desktop GPUs as well as ION desktop GPUs, and you can get it right here on Softpedia, whether you're system is running Windows XP (download here), Windows XP x64 (download here) or Windows Vista/7 (download here) or Windows Vista/7 x64 (download here).

Similar to the beta release, the new WHQL driver release from NVIDIA will bring about a serious performance boost in certain PC games, and if you're just curious what titles will be affected and in what manner, you should check out the release notes available in each of the aforementioned download pages.

NVIDIA also mentions the fact that, compared to the previous 266.35 Beta driver, the new release delivers improved scaling quality with video streaming content from 3DVisionLive.com (NVIDIA's own 3D content online portal), as well as support for new 3D Vision Desktop LCD monitors and several new game profiles for NVIDIA 3D Vision.

Moreover, the drivers also bring about certain improvements as far as NVIDIA's Surround technology is concerned, including enhanced performance for 3-way and 4-way SLI configurations, while also enabling the GPU to support the playback of Blu-ray 3D discs when connecting it to an HDMI 1.4 3D TV.

Blu-ray playback compatibility also includes lossless DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD audio bitstreaming support, plus high definition 24-bit, 96 and 192 KHz multi-channel audio sampling rate support.

As you can see, there are plenty of reasons to update your drivers to the new version, especially since we're not expecting the next-generation release until the arrival of the GTX 560 or later.