New in Release 260.89
New GPU Support:
Adds support for the newly released GeForce GT 430 GPU.
Performance:
Increases performance for GeForce GTX 400 Series GPUs in several PC games vs. v258.96 WHQL drivers. The following are examples of some of the most significant improvements measured on Windows 7. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration:
GeForce GTX 480:
Up to 10% in StarCraft II (2560x1600 4xAA/16xAF Ultra)
Interesting post from Caveman Jim over at Rage3D regarding total power draw from modern (and affordable) IPS monitors plus his Radeon 5830, versus two older 4:3 panels and an older video card:
"We go look it up, and a single 2007FP burns 75W, it's an 16ms Ultrasharp with IPS and old ass backlight. The P2310H burns 22W, and is a TN 5ms panel with dual CCFL. Not even LED backlight. Idle power on the 2007FP is 2W, on the P2310h 0.42W.
We've had a week or so of slow news, and we've been offline in various amounts since Thursday. We are back online and better than ever! A core group of folks have worked for the past seven months to migrate and transform the old site (based on phpBB3 and MediaWiki) into a unified Drupal install.
Information should be much easier to find, and search now works site-wide. There are still some issues we're working out, but the team is very happy that we can finally share all of our hard work.
Tom's Hardware has published their latest iteration of Best Graphics Cards For The Money, so if your in the market for an upgrade, and have a fair idea of what your budget is, you should check this article out.
Forum member HaYDeN has teased some images from an upcoming Eyefinity/Surround fix for Mass Effect. He even talks about a "universal patch" for UT3-based titles. That would be nice indeed.
Forum member Ceogar had a playtest on BF3 and spoke with DICE, and they confirmed Eyefinity/Surround support in BF3. Support is planned to be the same as Bad Company 2, which was excellent.
AMD & HardOCP are sponsoring an effect in Dallas Texas on July 16th. Come join us for our first WSGF Meet-Up and get sneak peeks at AMD's Bulldozer platform, as well as hands on with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Hit this forum thread for more details.
This release brought a mix of video playback improvements and performance enhancements. There were several new features:
AMD Steady Video & Image Stabilization for YouTube - Reduces shakiness and instability in videos.
Decode Acceleration of MPEG-4 video - Accelerated processing of MP4 video.
Performance Improvements - Gains of 5% - 10% in Crysis, F1 2010, Far Cry 2, HAWX and Unique OpenGL for Radeon HD 6000 products.
Koawinter quoted a forum post from the Star Wars: TOR site. The original post was from Michael Voigt, who is the Lead UI Artist at BioWare Austin. In the post Michael confirmed that SW:TOR ran on three screens, and that the game's map screen had been tailor for the multi-monitor experience. You can see the original quote and link back into the SW:TOR forum here.
YouTube now offers support for NVIDIA's 3D Vision. Videos shot in any 3D medium (Nintendo 3DS, 3D HDV Cam, PC Game Capture) can be viewed through support for side-by-side Stereoscopic 3D.
The system will automatically detect a 3D Vision setup and play the appropriate video. If a 3D Vision setup isn't detected, many videos will provide a red/blue anaglyph image. Anyone with a pair of red/blue glasses can view this content.
