Nvidia has released a new set of drivers for GeForce card owners and offered an apology to anyone who experienced fan speed issues after installing the preceding version. If you recall, just two weeks ago the company's 196.75 driver was pulled from Nvidia's website following reports that it was causing fans to slow down or outright stop working while gaming, and in some cases even damaging the motherboard or CPU from the increased temperatures.

Read the whole story

Took them long enough to fix the fan issue. This driver came out - and was almost immediately canceled due to the fan issue - two weeks ago.

It's the first time I've seen them take so long with fixing an update... Sure glad I didn't install the bad drivers, that would have sucked burning up my 3 Nvidia GTX275 OC's! Not to mention VERY expensive!!!

Had forgot about this already, really took them a while to fix the issues

So, they got a fix put together and apologized... Are they replacing the units their drivers slagged? Or is it just a case of "tough luck" for the victims? Just curious.

hey they solved this problem now?
it is pretty much old i think! :P
but its better to be late than never! lol

I'm glad they finally fixed it.

Didn't affect me in no way, but I'm glad its fixed. Didn't expect drivers to affect the system in that way even though if you think about it.. it's probably the only component in a gamer's PC that's what you'd probably call the essential component that is probably being used every moment of the PC life.

I'm just curious to see what games have performance improvements in them. It would be nice to see BFBC2 in the list.

Lucky I didnt update my driver. But it was cooking like a frying pan, loong before these troubles anyway.

More performance improvements?
If they can increase performance by up to 30% in one driver update, why isn't all of this stuff on the card day one?
Do they just discover little bits of code that they can fix or something?

Can't say I've seen any accounts of people with affected cards not being taken care of. I'm pretty certain in the present climate that if there were cases where customers were being left out in the cold, then they would 1. be quite vocal on various forum sites, and 2. AMD's PR machine, in all it's forms, would certainly have publicised the fact-much the same as nV's/Intel's PR (also, in all its forms) manage to keep AMD's problems in the public domain.

Anyone able to comment on the quality and stability of the new driver?

Something like that.

The "up to 30% improvement" seems more geared towards recent releases ( Heaven benchmark, Metro 2033, BFBC2 etc.)
Sounds like SLI is improved and if you download the latest PhysX component (10.02.22_9.10.0222) which is newer than the version in 197.13, that will also add improvements where PhysX is used.
I wouldn't read too much into the increases as I think the main bug-fix was the fan issue.
Bear in mind that this a beta driver (not WHQL) so I'd be doubly careful about monitoring the system when using it initially. Personally, I wont be downloading it as a new driver set (WHQL) will likely be released in a week or so since this driver has no provision for GTX470/480 which will in all liklihood be released (at least to a select few) in that timeframe.

EDIT: Guru3D have a good thread here regarding the new driver for anyone who is nervous about running it. There are a few trolling posts but they are easily recognizable

I don't how to can get away like that with just an apology. Getting RMA sometimes hard as it is, so how to distinguish if manufacturer's fault vs user issue?
I think they should be some kind of fair compensation and they had better buck up on testing their drives properly before releasing.

starcraft 2 beta players rejoice! too bad it took them this long to actually release the drivers

about time, i need a good driver update for my cards. (but ill wait a few weeks, to make sure its not going to fry my video cards)

I told my friend about this. He couldn't believe software was frying cpus. His computer was overheating, ironically.

Let's add some oil to make our cpu's crispy... At last they fixed it, long life for my gaming.... I'll download the update...

I will wait till it is not in beta status anymore, the word is that nvidia does not replace burnt cards as beta drivers are released "as is"