They are official and on Nvidia's site, so they're not fakes.158.18 beta driver for Geforce 7/8 cards for Vista 32 and 64 bit158.19 beta driver for Geforce 8 cards for XP (these probably work for 7 series cards, too).http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp

Sounds like the Vista folk remain frustrated, but XP reports sound good. I'm still on XP... I might consider installing these. If you install these, let me know if you see any issues with FSX.

If you read down, apparently the 165.01 works on Vista, too (I can't confirm as I'm on XP).Thomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)N15802 KASH '73 Piper Cherokee Challenger 180

I'll be trying either the 158.x or 165.x driver soon on Vista x64. I'll post my before and after FPS.

They work on the 7 series - you have to use a modded inf file though. I have no freaking clue why Nvidia insists on only supporting the 8 series cards now, it's really annoying.

nm

Greetings All, Well this thread clears up a lot of things for me. After switching my beloved ATI X850 PE for a 7800GS OC I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to achieve the same graphics quality I had before.I thought it had more to do with 3head2go then nvidia drivers.I tried drivers all the way back to 84.56 with no avail.At least now I can rest knowing I'm not alone on this issue.Just for the record I wound up using 93.81 mods from guru3d.They are workinking best for my rigBest regardsAndrew

The problems with Nvidia drivers are bugs (most of them having to do with settings not sticking or working or games not working period), not graphics quality issues. And they are overwhelmingly Vista related.As far as graphics quality, previous to the 8800 series ATI/AMD did have an advantage, but to notice it you would have to magnify two screenshots side-by-side. I don't think you could actually perceive the diff in-game.If you think the rendering simply doesn't look as nice, especially if you are XP I think you are likely imagining it or you don't have your settings set the same (AA, VSync, scaling, etc).

All of you with shimmering problems makes sure you set the driver settings to quality in the NV control panel and not performance.________________________________________________________________________________________________Intel D975XBX2 'Bad Axe 2' | Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.20Ghz | 2 GB Super Talent DDR2 800 | Big Typhoon VX | eVGA 8800GTS @ 565/900 | Seagate 2x320GB SATA RAID-0 | OCZ GameXStream 700W | Creative X-Fi | Silverstone TJ-09BW | Matrox Triplehead Setup

OK. I have a report. Not much of a change.With the 101.x drivers I was using, loading the VOR Navigation lesson with a VC, I got:25-26 FPS, hitting 27 briefly, down to 17 very briefly.With the 158.x driver:25-26 FPS, hitting 27 briefly, down to 19 and 22 very briefly.So it looks like the low end has come up a bit. But the basic average FPS didn't change.This is with normal Autogen, no bloom, 2.x low water.

I found much the same thing with the 158 drivers. Annoying I still can't run FSX fullscreen without it continuing to 'flash', so windowed is the only option for me.

Well, I feel bad for questioning reports of overall image quality and shimmering. I think AA is somehow broke, at least in FSX, with the 158 drivers. I have my AA set to 16x and I definetly notice "shimmering" along the edge of objects. I can't tell if AA is not working at all... but if it is working, its working poorly. I did not notice this on my 97.92's.As far as performance, I made a flight recording over PDX and used Fraps to benchmark before and after installing the 158 drivers and did notice some small gains:WinXPA64 2.2GHz2Gig8800 GTS97.92:Min: 12, Max: 25 (My target FPS was set to 25), Avg: 18.37158:Min: 14, Max: 26, Avg: 19.63So the average FPS came up 7%. I'm not sure how much stock you can put in the Min FPS since I think that is generally going to vary a good deal, but according to these tests it came up 16%.Also, 3DMark03 is one where people were reporting good performance gains, so I tried it and found I gained 15% (22468 to 25917).But assuming I can't find a fix for this AA problem, I think I'll be rolling back-- the AA problem is much more noticeable to me than the FPS increase.

Ignore my complaint about AA and shimmering in that last post. I had mistakenly set the Nvidia drivers to override the app setting for AA, but then set Ansio to 16x instead of AA to 16x. (AA was only set to 2x) I noticed the mistake and set AA to 16x like it should have been and it looked dandy.I reran the benchmark to make sure it wasn't going to make a difference, and it came back nearly identically (min and max FPS were the exact same, avg actually came up a tenth of an FPS).So I'm sticking with 158.16 after all...