also @ TechSpot: Codemasters announces £125,000 special edition of GRID 2

Nvidia releases GeForce 290.36 beta driver

By

On November 28, 2011, 4:30 PM

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

, , , , , ,

Related Products from Product Finder

Zotac GeForce GTX 570 1280MB PCIe

Read expert reviews, pros & cons, and product information about Zotac GeForce GTX 570 1280MB PCIe. There are 10 reviews available so far.

7 Reviews

Asus GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB GDDR5 PCIe

Read expert reviews, pros & cons, and product information about Asus GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB GDDR5 PCIe. There are 20 reviews available so far.

10 Reviews

Asus GeForce GTX 590 3GB GDDR5 PCIe

Read expert reviews, pros & cons, and product information about Asus GeForce GTX 590 3GB GDDR5 PCIe. There are 19 reviews available so far.

10 Reviews

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 Super OC 1280MB

Read expert reviews, pros & cons, and product information about Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 Super OC 1280MB. There are 16 reviews available so far.

8 Reviews

User Comments: 5

Got something to say? Post a comment
  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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

  4. ^

    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.

Recently commented stories

Post a new comment

Social Login & Guest Posting TechSpot Members
Login here or sign up for free,
it takes about a minute.
Get complete access to the TechSpot community. Join thousands of technology enthusiasts that contribute and share knowledge in our forum. Get a private inbox, upload your own photo gallery and more.
TechSpot on:

Subscribe to TechSpot

Get free exclusive content, learn about new features and breaking tech news.