A new beta version of NVIDIA's ForceWare drivers has just been made available on NVIDIA's website.

While only a beta, version 182.05 could well be worth a shot as NVIDIA promises some decent performace gains in some of the latest games when using AA combined with high resolutions. Details as follows:

- Up to 8% performance increase in Fallout 3 at high resolution and AA.
- Up to 10% performance increase in F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.
- Up to 9% performance increase in Half-Life 2 at high resolution with AA.
- Up to 11% performance increase in Left 4 Dead at high resolution with AA.
- Up to 10% performance increase in Race Driver: GRID at high resolution and AA.

Other release highlights include full support for OpenGL 3.0 across all GeForce 8, 9 and 200 series GPUs as well as the implementation of a new PhysX System Software build, 9.09.0203.

Speaking of which, if you prefer you can download the latest PhysX software seperately from this page if you don't want to upgrade your existing ForceWare graphics driver to the new beta.

Here's what's new with the new PhysX release:

- Resolves PhysX SDK runtime issues with multi-GPU configurations in Hybrid environments.
- Improves performance of some PhysX enabled games on GeForce GTX 285 and GTX 295 products.
- Resolves occasional system crashes when PhysX is enabled on some systems when running on EA's Mirrors Edge.
- Runtime upgrade ONLY for AGEIA PhysX processors users. (New installations should install older PhysX system software such as version 8.09.04 - prior to installing this update).
- Includes the latest PhysX runtimes used in the latest game titles.

You can download the new 182.05 ForceWare driver with PhysX 9.09.0203 included straight from NVIDIA's driver downloads page for Vista 32 and 64-bit here.