Nvidia, ATI Release New Drivers

Both Nvidia and ATI released new drivers over the past few days: Nvidia's GeForce 185.68 beta driver and ATI's Catalyst 9.4

Both Nvidia and ATI released new drivers over the past few days: Nvidia's GeForce 185.68 beta driver and ATI's Catalyst 9.4

Wednesday Nvidia quietly released a new GeForce beta driver, supporting the GeForce 9 series, 100 series, and the 200 series desktop GPUs. Now listed as v185.68 (98,9 MB), the only new feature the beta driver offers is optimized performance for the PC game The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Originally, v185 brought support for the new GeForce GTX 275 GPU and CUDA 2.2. The driver also gave many PC games a considerable performance boost including Crysis: Warhead (22-percent), Far Cry 2 (14-percent), and Mirror's Edge (45-percent). In addition, Nvidia added support for the GeForce Plus Power Pack #3 as well as provide numerous bug fixes.

Consumers interested in downloading the new v185.68 beta drivers can do so by hitting the links provided below:

Nvidia GeForce Driver 185.68 Beta: Windows XP (32bit) (64bit)

Nvidia GeForce Driver 185.68 Beta: Windows Vista (32bit) (64bit)

Thursday AMD also released a new driver, Catalyst 9.4, just twenty-two days after the release of v9.3. In this release, AMD has included the new ATI Overdrive auto-tune application, a program that finds over-clocked engine and memory values for Radeon cards that support the ATI Overdrive feature (in this case, the Radeon HD 4000 series). The ATI Overdrive technology allows for safe overclocking by constantly monitoring the GPU temperature, ensuring that it always stays at a safe level. More additional info regarding ATI Overdrive can be found here.

Furthermore, the Catalyst 9.4 driver also addresses a few additional issues including a problem with flickering in World of Warcraft when Shadow is set to medium/high using ATI CrossFire configurations, full screen resolution problems above 1024 x 768 for specific HDMI displays, and many other issues.

"We work hard to deliver the best platform solutions that consist of CPU and GPU, said AMD senior manager of advanced marketing Ian McNaughton. "As the only company in the industry that can deliver both we have the unique opportunity to develop free software to optimize performance across AMD-based platforms. I don’t think we say enough about our gaming software."

To download the new Catalyst 9.4 drivers, head here.