Nvidia releases beta GeForce drivers for holiday PC games

GeForce owners hoping to get the most out of new PC games may want to grab the latest drivers from Nvidia. Posted today, the 310.61 beta is deemed a minor update over last week's 310.54 beta release, but it improves support for Planetside 2 and Hitman: Absolution, both of which officially launched today. Folks playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II on a multi-GPU setup will also benefit from 310.61's new SLI profile.

Download GeForce 310.61 beta (release notes)
Desktop: Windows Vista/7 32-bit | Windows Vista/7 64-bit (XP 32/64-bit desktop users and Vista/7/8 32/64-bit notebook users can grab 310.54)

Although 310.61 itself doesn't bring major changes, it's worth noting that it should carry all the tweaks made in the more substantial 310.54 release (PDF), including a 26% performance increase in Black Ops II and 18% in Assassin's Creed III over October's 306.97 WHQL drivers. It also boosts frame rates in some other titles, including Battlefield 3, Skyrim, StarCraft II, Dragon Age II, Batman: Arkham City and MoH: Warfighter.

Build 310.54 also brought new or updated SLI Profiles for Dirt: Showdown, Dota 2, Dou Zhan Shen, F1 2012, FIFA 13, Hawken, Hitman: Absolution, Natural Selection 2, Primal Carnage and Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad -- not to mention various 3D Vision profile enhancements. Naturally, a handful of bugs have also been solved, including one that caused system lock ups when playing games in Surround mode on GTX 690 quad-SLI rigs and another that caused a blue screen of death on Windows 8 with the GeForce 540M.