Nvidia releases GeForce 296.17 for Windows 8, others get 296.10

Matthew DeCarlo

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Nvidia has baked a fresh batch of drivers, with two flavors covering Windows XP through Windows 8. Common folk running Windows XP, Vista or 7 should grab GeForce 296.10 as it boosts SLI performance in various titles, including Blacklight: Retribution, Dirt 3, Dishonored, Dungeon Defenders, F1 2011 and rFactor 2.

The update also either improves or adds 3D Vision profiles for Dear Esther and Deep Black: Reloaded. You'll also find support for the GTX 560 SE and roughly a dozen bug fixes across various applications when running on single and multi-GPU configurations (see page seven of the release notes for more information).

Download GeForce 296.10 (release notes)
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

Download GeForce 296.17 (release notes)
Desktop/Mobile: Windows 8 32-bit/64-bit

Folks who haven't upgraded from the R285 family yet can look forward to even more improvements. You can read our previous coverage of 295.73 for more details but the revision delivers a significant jump in Skyrim performance and adds support for Ambient Occlusion on various titles along with SLI profiles for 12 games and 3D Vision profile changes in 41 titles, not to mention other miscellaneous enhancements and fixes.

Although last month's R295 driver worked on Windows 8, it served as more of a generic driver with limited functionality. Version 296.17 solves that, adding full support for the new Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 1.2 along with 3D Vision and 3DTV Play products for more than 600 games, Blu-ray movies and photos. Nvidia notes that 296.17 doesn't support hybrid power with Intel chipsets or non-Siemens Fujitsu notebooks.

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296.10 said the install failed then the driver left behind didn't recognize my nvidia 275 geforce card. Had to uninstall manually after trying to reinstall about 4 times. Even the old driver would not work afterwards. Now I am downloading the 295.73 while using 285.62.

It might have just been me I was downloading the mortal online installer at the same time but I am going to wait a week before driving these new drivers again.
 
Hopefully the irritating problem of Firefox not displaying colours correctly will be over with these drivers. (I know, disabling hardware acceleration does the trick, but still...)
 
No problem with the install on two seperate machines here. (DL direct from Nvidia- sorry TS, the Nv server is much faster for me). Clean installs.
Had one customer with a glitched download/install. Think it came about due to driver and MS updates (patch Tuesday) trying to do their respective thing simultaneously. Uninstalled both and re-applied in order with no reoccurance of the system hang and incomplete install.
 
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