NVIDIA launches beta Forceware 180 drivers

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.