NVIDIA R319 Series Beta Driver 320.00 Available
by Jarred Walton on April 23, 2013 5:55 PM EST
NVIDIA's driver numbering can be a bit of a mystery at times, but after the R313 Series that encompasses all version 313.x and 314.x releases, NVIDIA is jumping ahead to their R319 Series drivers. Naturally, that means the first beta release of R319 is...320.00. Like I said, it can be a bit confusing at times. The good news is that the drivers as usual are available for all recent desktop and laptop GPUs.
OS support is a bit of a change from some releases. Windows XP and even Vista support look like they're finally starting to disappear, or at least they're not a high priority, so the current beta driver is only available for Windows 7 and 8 on laptops, in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Desktops on the other hand get the full set of support for everything from XP to Windows 8 in 32-bit and 64-bit form.
The big headliners for this series of drivers is that these are the "game ready" drivers for Dead Island: Riptide, Neverwinter, and Star Trek. NVIDIA is also listing performance improvements for single and SLI configurations for a variety of games, including Dirt: Showdown (up to 18%), Tomb Raider (up to 8%), and StarCraft II (up to 6%), though that's with a GTX 660 so your mileage may vary depending on your specific GPU. Other titles receiving performance tweaks include Sniper Elite V2, Metro 2033, Far Cry 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, F1 2012, Assassin's Creed III, Battlefield 3,and BioShock: Infinite.
The full list of driver download links is below. Thanks to reader SH SOTN for the heads up.
Laptops: Windows 7/8 64-bit
Laptops: Windows 7/8 32-bit
Desktops: Windows Vista/7/8 64-bit
Desktops: Windows Vista/7/8 32-bit
Desktops: Windows XP 64-bit
Desktops: Windows XP 32-bit
Source: NVIDIA Drivers
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smithg5 - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
The link for "Desktop: Windows Vista/7/8 64-bit" wasn't working for me, so I did a little fiddling with the URL and found success with this one:http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/61290
slayernine - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
Thank you smithg5, I was also having problems with that link.lowlymarine - Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - link
Not that it really makes nVidia's naming scheme any less nonsensical, but this actually isn't the first R319 series beta. nVidia released a 319.12 beta for *nix systems earlier in the month: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/539249/un...JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
That's almost worse -- what exactly did this driver do for Linux users? It's not helping with gaming performance in Neverwinter or Dead Island: Riptide I don't think (unless there are Linux ports?)JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
And now that I posted my snarky comment above, let's just say that the *nix driver release notes appear to have nothing in common with Windows. Not that they should, but I wonder where they actually overlap? http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/60198DanNeely - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I'd assume internals that convert OpenGL commands into raw GPU instructions are mostly the same.nevertell - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Well, I remember I read an interview on Phoronix with a Nvidia driver dev, and he actually said that the drivers share about 85% of their code base. The recent nvidia driver for linux layed the first steps towards a perfectly functional Optimus mechanism for linux. The thing is, Bumblebee, whilst not perfect, is still better. They haven't implemented anything functional though.xTRICKYxx - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
This fixed the overclock bug I was having with 314.XOn 310.X I could overclock my core clock to as high as I wanted, but 314 broke it to a mere 775MHz. Now I can go back to 1100Mhz on 320!
bakedpatato - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I wonder if these drivers do anything for TreesFX performance in Tomb Raider...my GTX 460 goes from 40FPS at 1080 to pretty much 1fps with TreesFX enabled!bakedpatato - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
that would be "tressfx" on that note.