Nvidia is getting ready to release some new driver versions that will bring major improvements to its cards. The drivers are expected to mark a "bang", a "Big Bang II" actually, as the Santa Clara-based company talks about the driver releases it has under preparations now. It has given this name to its ForceWare Release 180 or R180, which will finally introduce the SLI multi-monitor.

Nvidia made quite a fuss with its drivers that brought physics support to the GPU, and it seems that the company wants to go forth with the enhancements its drivers will bring. With R180, the firm enables more than one monitor to be used when multiple graphics cards are installed at the same time. Nvidia has been working on the SLI multiple monitor support since the introduction of the Scalable Link Interface technology in 2004.

Those that own a SLI system will not face the situation of having the second monitor turned dark after a 3D game was loaded. The new feature was highly expected by users, as the multiple monitor environment was widely spread and both ATI CrossFire and Nvidia SLI were lousy at working with it.

The new driver releases from Nvidia will also come with OpenGL 3.0 API, another major improvement delayed for almost a year. Technologies like Geometry Shaders, Texture arrays and other features introduced with DirectX 10 will have hardware support with OpenGL 3.0. The OpenGL API has been through a rough period lately, as it remained behind the hardware for the past two years, since the named technologies/features were introduced in November 2006 with the first DX10 GPU.

Another "bang" that comes with these drivers is the introduction of new SLI connectivity features. Nvidia says that users will be able to pair and combine its cards the same way that can be done with AMD/ATI cards (3870 X2 + single 3870). It remains to be seen whether one 9800GX2 can be paired with one 9800GTX or not. Support for new high-end and mainstream chips could come with the drivers.

As for the video features, R180 will come with support for 10-bit DisplayPort on Windows Vista. The DisplayPort is said to get to the color level offered by HDMI 1.3, the so called "billion colors".

The PureVideo Transcoder, a GPU-accelerated video encoder, is also included. The GPU-accelerated video transcoding will be brought to life by companies like Elemental. Nvidia also said that a new codec library would be available. According to the company, at least a 10X encoding speed increase compared to quad-core processors will be brought by the new library.

The Quadro cards will also benefit from a set of performance optimizations brought by R180. It’s possible that the company plans to add the improvement for these cards in the new release due to the fact that the new Quadro family is expected to arrive any week now.

A roadmap of the ForceWare Releases shows that Nvidia is preparing them on a quarterly basis. The R180 drivers are expected during September, while R185 will come in a period that stretches from December 2008 to February 2009. The R190 drivers should arrive anywhere in the March 23 - May 20 timeframe. Somewhere during the June 15 - August 14 timeframe, R195 will be released. The "Big Bang III" will be marked by R200, scheduled to come with DirectX 11 support.