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NVIDIA infamous new set of drivers has been made available over at 3D Chipset, the release is marked as version 51.75 Beta.

You will understand how NVIDIA is being heavily criticized after the Half-Life 2 performance fiasco, despite of their response where they attributed the poor performance the unoptimized set of drivers.

Just let's remember this is an unreleased game and this is an unofficial driver release. There is people out there behaving WAY too fanatically, it's true however that the way things are shaping up, it doesn't look too good for NVIDIA... actually we wouldn't care less for them, we do care however for those people who spent big bucks on their high-end cards expecting it to be a good investment.

Speaking of which, Aquamark 3 benchmark program is now available for download. This is one of the few 'true' DX9 performance gauge tools around.

"After receiving some emails from Andrew (European PR Manager for nVidia), we decided to pull down the Detonator 51.75 driver because this driver is not ready to go and is absolutely not ready to be installed on any machine yet. Andrew doesnt know exactly where its coming from, but nVidia released this driver to some hard- & software firms just for testing purposes, since theyve changed some interesting things for the 50.xx driver series.

Some of the release notes for this driver that were floating around the net are just a fake & have nothing to offer current nVidia card based owners.

Andrew also told us that nVidia has made some improvements in the new Detonators 50.xx series, including some enhancements to nView.

All in all, we can say that after a little talk we agree with nVidia to remove the driver and to make our visitors aware of the fact that this release is not official and also not allowed yet by nVidia.

Thanks to Andrew Humber from nVidia for the info!"