Introduction

 

We saw the release of the nVidia Forceware 81.84 BETA drivers last month and performance improvements with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 processors was very impressive to say the least. The new drivers really helped begin to make use of that second core we have with the X2 processor.

 

This month we see the release of the driver officially and we will be comparing the 81.94 against the last official driver, Forceware 78.01.

 

Should you be updating drivers for your GeForce graphics card? Read on and find out!

 

Release notes from nVidia

 

While this is where we normally put the release notes, this driver release has a 126 page PDF document attached to it that lists a whole lot of information - some useful and others not so useful.

 

Here are some of the release highlights, as a quick summary:

 

- Adds support for GeForce 7800 GTX 512 and GeForce 6800 GS

 

- Improved performance for Quake 4

 

- Improved performance and compatibility for Call of Duty 2

 

- Mixed vendor support for NVIDIA SLI

 

- TV-Out/HD-out support for NVIDIA SLI

 

- Added support for VSync on Direct3D games when running NVIDIA SLI

 

- Performance enhancements for dual-core CPUs

 

- PureVideo high definition MPEG-2 de-interlacing support

 

- Usability enhancements when connecting to an HDTV

 

We think it's safe to say that we will let the results speak for themselves. You can download the release notes PDF here if you're interested in bug fixes and so forth.