Nvidia releases GeForce 290.36 beta driver

[Jos]

Nvidia has issued a new set of beta drivers designed to bring a slew of improvements for the latest PC games on the market. Among them, the GeForce 290.36 Beta adds more realistic shadowing in Skyrim and Modern Warfare 3 with ambient occlusion support, while fixing screen flickering and triangular artifacts in Battlefield 3. Nvidia also recommends the update to Batman: Arkham City players "for the best PhysX experience."

The new beta drivers also enable Nvidia Surround support for Intel X79 SLI-certified motherboards, and add or updates SLI profiles for Crysis 2, Heroes and Generals, Inversion, Stronghold 3, and Syndicate. Those interested in 3D gaming will get support for 3D Vision over native DisplayPort 1.1 connection as well as new or updated 3D Vision profiles for a bunch of games, including L.A. Noire and Modern Warfare 3.

In addition, there are quite a bit of bug fixes included in the GeForce 290.36 beta drivers, addressing nuisances from random screen flickering to corruption issues in several games.

This is the first beta release from the Release 290 family of drivers and, as usual, it supports GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500-series desktop GPUs as well as ION desktop GPUs. You can read the full release notes along some screenshots on Nvidia's GeForce website or hit the download links below.

Desktop: Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit | Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit
Mobile: Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit

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https://www.techspot.com/news/46440-nvidia-releases-geforce-29036-beta-driver.html

 

[lawfer]

Great news. I noticed that while playing Arkham City, frame rate was great at upper 50s, but sometimes it lagged and dropped down to the 30s. This happened occasionally where PhysX was in heavy use, such as when Batman walked through fogs, stepped on bricks laying on the floor, or through any movable object ruled by physics in the game engine.

This should fix all of that.

 

[dividebyzero]

The framerate dropouts are a game bug if you're using the DX11 path

 

[slamscaper]

Just tested Arkham City on the 290.36 drivers. I noticed a very small improvement with PhysX on high (single GTX 580), but nothing to write home about.

DX11 mode is still borked. We're going to need a patch from the developer to remedy this issue. They have already said that one is in the works... In the meantime, the game still looks spectacular in DX9.

 

[isamuelson]

What about fixing the black screen of death in Media Center? That was annoying and I had to roll back to older drivers.

 

[herpaderp]

^

Fixes playback of videos or live TV using Window Media Center resulting in a black screen.

It's in the release notes, hope it really does fix it.