A brief warning to fellow nVidia users and the WHQL 320.18 driver

[Dhalmel]

Hi guys


Just want to send a word of caution about the current WHQL 320.18 driver from nVidia. It seems NV has released a lemon causing bsods, game artifacting, lowered game performance, and in some unfortunate cases some individuals have bricked their cards.

How is this related to the benchmark? Well sadly ARR benchmark is one of the titles where performance has suffered averaging around a 10~15% drop in performance depending on the card.

Now these issues isn't happening to everyone but there's alot of chatter going on and more than just one odd person reporting the issues mentioned above.

I advise all users except for those few on a 780 to please avoid this driver for now and stick to the 314.22 WHQL driver.

314.22 WHQL Driver:

Windows Vista ~ Win8 x64: http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/59641
Windows Vista ~ Win8 x32: http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/59640
Windows XP: http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/59642
Windows XP 64: http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/59643

UPDATE 06/03/2013: Please fill out this feedback survey to get proper notification with Nvidia reguarding the poor performance with this driver and this benchmark..and other things. The more people report the issue the more likely this will be fixed in a future driver.

http://surveys.nvidia.com/index.jsp?...f07694a40f8ac6

UPDATE 06/14/2013 Disregard the benchmark performance. It seems any performance problems that were related to the 320.18 driver was fixed, at least with GPU utilization, in the Phase 3 build as of now. The driver overall though is still not fully stable for everyone and everything so USE AT YOUR OWN RISK, only use this driver if it seems to fix some kind of bug that is present with the 314.22 driver or earlier. Also for added safety turn down any aggressive overclocks that you may have.


Cheers
-Dhalmel