14 DAY TRIAL // After acquiring Ageia, Nvidia announced it would release the PhysX support for its GeForce graphics cards. We have been waiting for a while, but the new GeForce 177.39 driver finally brings the PhysX to us. The new GeForce driver is sourced by the guys from TweakPC, and dated June 16, one day before the official 177.35 WHQL appeared on Nvidia's website. The new 177.39 comes with support for Nvidia's GeForce 9800 GTX, GeForce 9800 GTX+, GeForce GTX 260 and 280 graphics cards, as well as for nForce 750a SLI and 780a SLI IGPs.
As soon as the new GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 GPUs have been launched on the market, Nvidia also made available on its site the necessary drivers for them. The official version of the drivers is 177.35, dated June 17, and they are already WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) certified both for Windows XP (x32/x64) and Vista (x32/x64).
Besides offering support for the newly released graphics cards, Nvidia designed the drivers to support single GPU and NVIDIA SLI technology on DirectX 9 and OpenGL, as well as GPU overclocking and temperature monitoring in the case NVIDIA System Tools software is installed. The Folding@home distributing computing application has also a beta support coming to us with the new drivers. They also sport nForce 780a SLI and nForce 750a SLI; yet, the 3-way SLI technology and Hybrid SLI technology can be used only with Windows Vista.
The Nvidia PhysX driver recommended with the new 177.39 (released both for Windows XP x32/x64 and Windows Vista x32/x64) graphics driver is 8.06.12, and it has to be installed for the PhysX support to be activated. Older cards have the 175.19 drivers available, which seems to offer the best performance in 3DMark Vantage. Yet, these drivers do not have the PhysX activated. A driver that would bring PhysX support for Nvidia's GeForce 8 and 9 graphics cards series is expected to be released sometime during July this year.