NVIDIA has released beta drivers which have been coded with Battlefield 3 in mind. The drivers are named as GeForce R285.38 and are available immediately from NVIDIA's site. Supported products range from as old as the GeForce 6 series to the latest GeForce 500 series. 

The release comes at a good time since the open beta of Battlefield 3 will be available on Thursday 29th (27th if you pre-ordered through Origin). NVIDIA claims up to a 38% performance increase in Battlefield 3, as well as overall stability improvements. The beta drivers add better support for SLI configurations in a few other games too, such as Diablo III and Saints Row: The Third. 

Source: NVIDIA

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  • Pessimism - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link

    Hardware manufacturers shouldn't be rewriting drivers for a specific title. The game developer should be coding the game properly to use the hardware, just like every other existing title. This just tells me the game is a horribly written mess just like Crysis was, and if you run a Radeon you can forget about decent performance.
  • danielkza - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link

    Or DICE actually worked with NVIDIA and AMD so they can improve their drivers for some of the features and techniques they plan on using.

    www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/directx-11-rendering-in-battlefield-3
  • retrospooty - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link

    "The game developer should be coding the game properly to use the hardware"

    This is beta, that is a keyword. This is Beta test of battlefield 3, and beta drivers from Nvidia. If youy arent interested in such things down download either. Wait for the official releases.
  • A5 - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link

    AMD is releasing beta drivers too, so I don't really know what your point is.
  • SlyNine - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link

    False Dichotomy, They are not mutually exclusive.

    It takes both to best optimize ANY game. Your comment is baseless.
  • SlyNine - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link

    posted to soon.

    There are those, and many other things that need to be tweaked for the optimum gaming experience.
  • Pessimism - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link

    My point is that this represents an unnatural reversal of the development process.

    A video card is a part. It has an established spec of what exactly it can do, how quickly, and how to tell it do do those things

    A game is a product, which requires that part to run. Ergo, the game must be designed to the published specification of the video card. The video card manufacturer is under zero obligation to modify the specification of their product for a specific publisher's game. Why should a game developer expect that a hardware manufacturer will cater to their unwillingness or inability to use their product?

    Conversely,
    If a game publisher discovers, hey, this API is garbage, and function X does not provide the performance or behavior outlined in your hardware specification, please correct it, that is a different story.
  • SlyNine - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link

    Yea, if that's what's going on here.

    But are you saying the only way to tweak a driver is to lower the integrity of the image and/or challenge the integrity of the way the image is drawn/ processed.

    I'm not much of a programmer, So I'd be speculating if I said it was one way or another. But it seems to me their are simply more efficient ways that a driver can do things. Code that can be written more efficiently without sacrificing the end result.

    But isn't this really an old arugment, even if thats what they did we both know that ATI/AMD and Nvidia have done this for years.
  • SlyNine - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link

    " Conversely,
    If a game publisher discovers, hey, this API is garbage, and function X does not provide the performance or behavior outlined in your hardware specification, please correct it, that is a different story. ."

    And now I read the rest of your post lol, sorry for not reading it all to start with.

    Ok, so your point isn't "baseless ", but I just got off a graveyard shift and my mind is swiss anyways. But I think this is much "apu" over nothing.

    Otho I will say I agree that certian tweaks need to have the ability to be shut off.
  • pewter77 - Monday, September 26, 2011 - link

    The thing is that games are not coded for specific Video Cards, they are coded on DirectX in mind, which means that there might be changes in the game engine that don't work well with a certain card. Hence the need for optimization by the video card companies. Not to mention bugs in the drivers, and sli/crossfire profiles are different for every game. Unfortunately all game engines are not the same and use hardware differently which means, the card company is required to release drivers that optimize the engine for all their cards and their architecture.

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