With the "official" release of Windows 7 RC to the MSDN and TechNet subscribers today along with the public release scheduled for May 5th, NVIDIA released beta GPU driver set 185.81 today. The 32-bit driver set is available here and the 64-bit release is located here. Our first results this morning indicate this driver set is much more polished than the 181.71 release, along with several improvements in gaming performance and platform stability. NVIDIA also released the 185.81 driver set for the Vista and XP operating systems.

The release notes are listed below:

This is a beta driver supporting GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, and 200-series desktop GPUs. This driver package installs WDDM v1.1 for GeForce 8, 9, and 200-series (DirectX 10) GPUs and WDDM v1.0 for GeForce 6 and 7-series (DirectX 9) GPUs.

This driver supports all of the new Windows 7 GPU-accelerated DirectX APIs: DirectX Compute, Direct2D, DirectWrite, and DXVA-HD.

New in Release 185.81:

• Adds support for the new GeForce GTX 275 GPU.
  
• Adds support for Ambient Occlusion – the newest NVIDIA Control Panel feature to offer enhanced 3D gaming realism exclusively to GeForce GPUs.
  
• Adds support for CUDA 2.2 for improved performance in GPU Computing applications. See CUDA for more details.
  
• Expands GPU hardware acceleration for the NVIDIA Video Encoding library to GPUs with less than 32 cores. Applications using this library include CyberLink PowerDirector 7, Nero Move it 1.5, Loilo SuperLoiloScope MARS, and CyberLink MediaShow Espresso.
  
• Accelerates performance in several 3D applications. The following are examples of improvements measured with Release 185 drivers vs. Release 181 drivers (results will vary depending on your GPU, system configuration, and game settings):
  
  • Up to 25% performance increase in The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
    
  • Up to 22% performance increase in Crysis: Warhead with antialiasing enabled
    
  • Up to 11% performance increase in Fallout 3 with antialiasing enabled
    
  • Up to 14% performance increase in Far Cry 2
    
  • Up to 30% performance increase in Half-Life 2 engine games with 3-way and 4-way SLI
    
  • Up to 45% performance increase in Mirror’s Edge with antialiasing enabled
  
  
• Automatically installs the new PhysX System Software version 9.09.0408.
  
• Supports GeForce Plus Power Pack #3. Download these FREE PhysX and CUDA applications now!
  
• Numerous bug fixes. Refer to the release documentation notes.
  
• Users without US English operating systems can select their language and download the International driver here.

Existing Support:

• Supports single GPU and NVIDIA SLI technology on DirectX 9, DirectX 10, and OpenGL, including 3-way SLI, Quad SLI, and SLI support on SLI-certified Intel X58-based motherboards.
  
• Includes full support for OpenGL 3.0.
  
• Supports NVIDIA PhysX acceleration on a dedicated GeForce graphics card. Use one card for graphics and dedicate a different card for PhysX processing for game-changing physical effects. Learn more here. Note: GPU PhysX is supported on all GeForce 8-series, 9-series and 200-series GPUs with a minimum of 256MB dedicated graphics memory.
  
• Supports GPU overclocking and temperature monitoring by installing NVIDIA System Tools software.