NVIDIA unveils ForceWare graphics driver Release 81.84

The ForceWare graphics driver Release 81.84 from NVIDIA Corp. promises to deliver performance improvements on a variety of NVIDIA GPUs, including a performance boost of up to 15 percent for GeForce 7800 GTX GPUs in Battlefield 2; 5 percent improvement for GeForce 7800 GTX GPUs in Far Cry; and 5 percent for GeForce 7800 GTX GPUs running in SLI mode in Half Life 2.

According to the press release, the NVIDIA Release 80 graphics driver gives end users the ability to mix and match any SLI Ready graphics cards of like GPUs to use in an NVIDIA SLI configuration. Previously, NVIDIA explained, customers had to use two graphics card from the same vendor in an SLI configuration.

The ForceWare graphics driver Release 81.84 also offers dual core CPU performance optimizations, including performance increases of up to 15 percent for GeForce 7800 GTX GPUs running Far Cry in SLI mode, and up to 15 percent for GeForce 7800 GTX GPUs running Half Life 2. In addition, the new release features PureVideo quality enhancements, which are support for high definition, MPEG-2 de-interlacing on GeForce 6600 and higher GPUs.

The company added that a wide selection of notebook manufacturers will also be supported with its Release 80 graphics driver, the first time that NVIDIA mobile GPU users can take advantage of new features and performance with every NVIDIA graphics driver update.