NVIDIA launches beta Forceware 180 drivers

Sylvie Barak | Oct 22, 2008 10:52 PM
New beta drivers promise extra performance and more...
NVIDIA has lifted the veil of secrecy over its Big Bang II ForceWare 180 driver.

NVIDIA reckons its brand new Geforce 180 drivers are banging for three reasons. Better performance, support for multi-display SLI and for allowing users to dedicate a specific GPU to Physx. Well, it’s not exactly on the scale of the Big Bang, but it might qualify as a mildly titillating tremor.

A new driver release would hardly be worth releasing if it didn’t offer a performance boost, and the Geforce 180 is no exception. NVIDIA boasts gains of over 30 per cent in games like Far Cry 2, at 1680 x 1050 with 4x AA and 16x AF on a Geforce 9800 GTX+ and the new driver. But apparently most other games only see a pretty conservative, non earth shattering 10 per cent performance improvement.

But the final version of the driver – still in Beta – should show much improved performance on three way SLI rigs on an Intel X58 chipset and Core i7 CPU, says NVIDIA, who also noted "this is the first time we’ve enabled SLI on an Intel chipset, it’s really exciting for us." The collaboration should be coming to a system near you around next month.

NVIDIA boasts SLI will be available on X58s from anyone who’s anyone in the big-name motherboard manufacturer business. Oh yes, except for one important exception - Intel.

Two-slot x16 x16 native SLI configuration, three-slot x16, x8, x8 and four-slot x8, x8, x8, x8 will all apparently be available at launch.

Motherboards with NVIDIA’s nForce 200 SLI bridging chip will also support three-slot x16, x16, x16 and four slot x16, x16, x16, x16, but it’s likely to be a bit expensive.

It’s really the multi monitor options, however, that NVIDIA hopes will have fanboys falling all over it like primal ooze. NVIDIA certainly took its sweet cosmic time in putting it together due to the "substantial amount of driver engineering work", but now users can hook up two, four or even as many as six screen displays depending on what their system hardware allows.

Options include single-monitor gaming, multi-monitor gaming and windowed gaming, for playing an SLI-powered 3D game in a window while other apps are still open on the desktop.

But as great as that sounds to bug eyed gamers in theory, the catch is that if a user has two or three SLI enabled GPUs, only the first one can be hooked up to the screens which means good luck to you if you want more than two monitors!

Nvidia doesn’t see this as a problem though. Apparently, if a user might actually care to hook up as many monitors as NVIDIA originally said they could, they can simply connect to another 'different' GPU outside the SLI configuration. Messy? Well, what do you expect after a big bang?

As for which games will work across multiple screens, spinners say Microsoft Simulator X, World in Conflict and Supreme Commander will all work with SLI in multi-monitor gaming mode.

Moving on to another aspect of NVIDIA’s new 'creation', the big green headbangers say the firm has now come up with a new way for multiple graphics cards can take advantage of Physx.

Today, users can make a single graphics card or SLI rig to carry out both the graphics and PhysX calculations, however ForceWare 180 lets the user do PhysX calculations on a dedicated GPU, freeing up the main graphics card, or pair of SLI cards, to focus on graphics. Pretty good news if you have a few old graphics cards knocking about which could be used for Physx.

Keeping with Physx features, NVIDIA is also bunging a Physx configuration page in the NVIIDA control panel. This means users can decide whether they want Physx enabled or not and whether to shove it off to a separate dedicated GPU. NVIDIA reckons this can provide something in the region of a 42 per cent performance boost. We reckon seeing is believing.

Anyone who wants to have a go testing out ForceWare 180 themselves, the boys in green have released a Beta which they say will up the performance of Far Cry 2. Get your 32-bit Vista version here. Knock yer socks off.