14 DAY TRIAL // After serious beta testing and bug fixing, NVIDIA came out with a WHQL-candidate version of their GeForce driver: the 310.70. This is not a stable version, though
Usually, they used to add the term “beta” to the download so there would be no confusions, but it seems that, this time, they were in a rush and left it out. Adding to that, the drivers can be downloaded from the “beta” page of the site, meaning they are still in testing.
The highlight of this release is the 37% performance improvement for Far Cry 3. Alongside it, Call of Duty: Black Ops II gets a 26% boost, followed by The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, with an 18% improvement.
These are just the leading numbers: the list of games that benefit from this driver contains more than a dozen names.
Added to the driver are some new SLI profiles, increasing multi-GPU performance. The games they refer to are Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Hawken, Hitman: Absolution, Natural Selection 2 and Primal Carnage. To get these profiles, install the 310.70 driver, then right click the NVIDIA tray icon and select "Check for updates."
Issues that have been fixed with this release include shadow flickering in Assassin’s Creed 3, the desktop crash in Battlefield 3, “Driver not responding” error in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Hitman: Absolution and the "DirectX device was lost" crash reported when playing Final Fantasy XIV Online.
Also, Quad SLI GeForce GTX 690 systems should no longer lock-up when playing games in Surround.
Since you’re probably very eager to get to work, here are the download links to the drivers so you can stay “updated one minute ago.”