260.99 NV WHQL Driver

WHQL 260.99 version!

More new drivers out again LOL.

In TRUE NVIDIA Style lol. Keep them coming LOL.

NVIDIA DRIVERS 260.99 WHQL



http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia-multigpu-SLI-profile-update-v6-driver-la.html SLi Profiles.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia_system_tools_6.06.html Nvidia System Tools.


2X WHQL releases in the space of a week!!!

Cheers.

 

fingers crossed.... please... please let there be fix for the freezes in this one...
----------------
Been playing The Force Unleashed Ultimate Sith Edition for almost an hour...
No crash so far! whereas it always crashed within 15 minutes with the previous driver.
hope this one's a keeper.

 

ManuelG @ nVidia forums

260.99 Release notes

 

Hybrid sli is still working for R1, just installed and working, not so sure about the freezing problem.

 

Good thing we have Nvidia chipsets in our M17x R1's

 

It is nice we have nVidia chipsets (at least in this case ), however, makes you wonder if the next Verde release will remove our Hybrid functionality (ManuelG mentions Intel specifically for this release, but the notes mention the functionality as a whole). Of course, what manufacturers are even using nVidia chipsets for their laptops these days (I think none, since most are using Nehalem type processors and Intel has left nVidia in the cold on that one)?

Been running these for an hour and a half now, no crashes or artifacts; Will try some games "shortly".

 

he said for Intel chipsets,the R1 has nVidia chipset!

 

Yup Nvidia did this a few months back too. The boomerang full functionality got dropped too. Others and myself were quite annoyed about this. Nvidia has recently brought back the boomerang powers so we don't need to use the power profile options anymore. I would say support for our systems will continue. Just the intel ones have always been on and off from what I saw with previous older drivers dating back from like almost 6 months ago till now.

Cheers.

 

During my lunch break, i installed the 260.99, and it has been up and running for exactly 1 hour with no black screen lock up! I'm going to let it run until i go home in 3 hours and hope for the best!

 

What about waking from sleep?

 

I put it to sleep, and it woke up perfectly! It is still going with no black screen. I have Diablo 2, Glyph 2, 7 wonders, DPC Latency Checker, a flash video playing in Firefox, a 500 page PDF, Adagio - Archangels in Black playing in VLC, and Photoshop CS3 running together. I really need to install another game with high-end graphics for this kind of test lol. All i have is WoW which will not run without an internet connection.

 

Upgraded from .89 last night, which I had no issues with. These new ones seem ok last night after some brief testing with Borderlands and STO. Using hybrid and no black screens when coming out of sleep - then again I haven't had that issue in many many months.

Still having to use Throttlestop which is a pain, but at least it's a simple solution, unless I forget to run it.

 

Finds my external monitor okay on boot up, that hasn't worked right since 257s.
Haven't had any HDMI-Audio static, been getting that since after 197s
No black screen or lockups yet, no fans kicking in during web browsing like I've had recently either.

So at very worst, def the best 2XX drivers for my 280M SLI machine.

 

So far so good for me with these drivers, haven't found any that have worked for over a year but this one has caused no issues yet for my 280M SLI. I play WoW and since the 4.0 patch my FPS dropped so low the game was unplayable with the stable drivers from 2009 I was using from Dell. So I started trying the newer ones and every version would stop responding at least once an hour. Finally this version seems to work with no crashes.

 

I started having driver failures/recoveries while typing in Word (2010 should it matter). Had to revert back to P06 beta.

 

will give these a try and see if my GPU stops crashing

 

Sigh, yeah, P06 has been the best for me too. Haven't tried this new one yet, although I really want to so I can get SLI in Fallout: NV.

 

Well, I've been pleased with these drivers; frame rates in Civ 5, WoW, and F:NV has been as high as with 260.89 (if not a bit steadier when the action ratchets up in WoW). Only issues I've had so far is on one start-up my slave card decided it no longer had to report clocks/temps (restart cleared it) and on another start the graphics driver kept crashing/recovering until I managed to restart again but was fine after that.

Still, after quite a few restarts and tests, only 2 failures is much nicer compared to what hell the rest of the 2xx drivers have put me through.

 

I got a black screen after 15 minutes of Fallout NV.

 

I have been lucky with the 259.xx/260.xx series of drivers. No freezes, no bsod, no restarts. What i get are higher temps and the slave card clock maxing outt its clock speed. Does anyone elses slave cards do this?

This is for a area51 m17x 9800m sli

 

I have been lucky with the 259.xx/260.xx series of drivers. No freezes, no bsod, no restarts. What i get are higher temps and the slave card clock maxing out its clock speed after playing a game. Does anyone elses slave cards do this?

This is for a area51 m17x 9800m sli

 

changing windows theme to basic and at nvidia control panel change to maximum performance theres no hangs at all. but kinda sucks at maximum performance always getting high temps. when i change back to adaptive it hangs after 15mins of gameplay

 

I hate having to revert back to older versions if this fails. I may try linpei1's method. But I'm not looking forward to getting back to normal after if it doesn't work. =(

 

nice improvement to FFXIV with this one, but still not great (Damn You SE for releasing this game too early). By the way BATBOY I LOVE your profile pic!

 

Any WOW player here ? I installed these drivers and FPS dropped from 60 to around 40, what's the deal ?

 

Are you running WoW in DX11 mode? With these, I see about 80+ fps in the wild, 60+ fps raiding, and it drops to about 40+ in Dalaran (but I think some of that may be the loading lag due to population).

 

I was getting a few lockups too and I tried changing to maximum performance and that seems to have solve it. But is there any other disadvantages other than more power consumption?

 

There shouldn't be chiefs. The adaptive and max performance option is more geared towards lower end notebooks with Nvidia GPU chips that aren't as highly speced or powerful as our ones. I'm pretty sure it just forces the powermizer options when in adaptive mode and doesn't use them as much in max performance mode. It should still be there though. A more profound affect with lower end GPUs.

Cheers.

 

well... i guess just more power consumption and higher temps

 

I've "restored to defaults" graphic settings and now it works like I was used to. But thanks for the tip, in DX11 mode I have 60fps everywhere, even in Dalaran although after 5 min I had a freeze, I'm not sure yet who's the culprit, either DX11 or the fact that I also OC'ed it to 2.5Ghz (that would be the first tho in a couple of months since I did it).


Back to the drivers now, mine still doesn't wake up from sleep.

I'm pretty sure it's a driver issue, but even so, I'm never buying Alienware laptops as long as I live. Does anyone else find it sad to see people being grateful that their machines run for 3 hours without lockups, can wake from sleep or are able to boot on battery and whatnot, when we're talking about a 2.5k laptop that can't seem to handle basic laptop-ish things ?

Sorry for the rant, but I had to get it out.

 

Hands down the best driver for me yet. Everything works! HDMI sound, ability to adj screen brightness on 9400gpu and 280's, Heck the sleep is even working!
Only hickup.... It cleared out my SLI profiles. I installed this EVGA | Articles | EVGA SLI Enhancement
Downloaded and ran the Geforce SLI Profiler tool to import the profiles.txt file back and now there all there. Finally a decient driver

 

got a black screen doing nothing. I am stuck with 197.84 =(

 

I am back to 197.16 260.99 sucks like all of them! black screens. blue screens. I can go on and on.

 

Just to put it out there, no kidding I had posted that the previous drivers were better blah blah blah. I then installed these in my Area 51 M17x with dual ancient 9800m gt's and my cards ran cooler, posted a 175 max FPS on the Hawx II demo (an almost 50FPS increase!) and no BSODs. Maybe some of you should try a complete drive sweep and dont instal the 3D drivers because 99.9% of us do not need them. Im playing the newest Fall Out at Ultra settings on 1600 res, Tier one maxed out, and the new Star wars maxed out. Highest card temp was a 92 after playing for two hours. Great driver!.

PS It is a M17x just the old one

 

That sounds promising, do you know what games are supported by that patch?

 

I gave it a shot as well, on first install I had some horrible driver crashes & recoveries in a row, I did a driver cleaning in safe mode then reinstalled it.

So far it's going well, for the first time it even woke up from sleep (although firefox crashed seconds after that, but hey, it's something).

Also, in World of Warcraft (the only game I play on it) now it looks like it's using both 280s (confirmed by load test & heat). Which brings me to the annoying part: when in-game the coolers fire up, but they never slow down after that (30+ min after exiting the game and sitting idle on desktop). Checked the temps, they're around 54C at which the computer was completely silent before. The only way to slow down the coolers are by restart or sleep Anyone else have this issue ?

Edit: might have found the cause, here's a note on the drivers download page: Notebooks supporting Hybrid Power technology with Intel chipsets are not supported by this release.

 

Alex,
Your system is not an Intel chipset.

My experience with these drivers has been fine. I mean, I can't say you get the best synthetic benchmark scores but general game stability is still there and some improvements can be noted in the newer titles. Not to mention, newer SLi profiles.

I assume that I am either very lucky, or very peculiar in how I use this system since I am not getting any of the black-screen/blue screen crashes or errors.

 

Hi,
i have alienware m17xr1 gtx260m sli.
Can anybody explain this pic? Have i got sli or not?

 

i just download the EVGA SLI Enhancement
lets try it!

 

watch it on control panel/ system / device manager, if you see 2 gtx 260, and 1 9400, you have sli gtx 260m

 

I am very tempted to roll back to the stable 186.82. Granted DPC will return with that driver, but I am tired of not being able to resume from S3 (sleep) with these newer Verde drivers.

*sigh*

Guess its time to start hacking up the SLI Profile updates again. Doing so will keep the system using SLI with the newer titles.

 

Only reason I'm not on 197.16 is that sli profile.
NVIDIA's sli profile updater doesn't work on older drivers.
And I heard like after 19x.xx drivers, they don't use the same xml file or whatever for those sli profiles anymore.
I'll be waiting for your sli profile update batboy.

 

Yeah, that issue of sleep is quite annoying. I thought it was something wrong with my machine. Never really used sleep mode much, but it is a pain when the system does go into sleep. . . accidentally.

Magnus72 from the XPS M1730 lounge has been known to run really new profiles on really old drivers. 186.82 is certainly a very fast and efficient driver, and since DPC in-game wasn't ever that much of a problem, I wouldn't mind reverting but I'd need the right profiles.

 

100% on the money guys. The SLI profile scheme has changed - just looked at it. Might not be able to pull off my SLI profile mods like before. Still looking into it though. Argh.

Kade, which driver are you running now on your 17xR1?

 

Shame about the profiles changing, but I mentioned Magnus because he's good at tweaking them via Nhancer, which also doesn't work with these new drivers.

I am running the 260.99 driver, seeing as it was the newest and I just recently got back into gaming. Before this driver, I was using the latest beta from Dell.

Just so we're clear. The sleep issue is that hitch where if the system is activated after sleep, it freezes at the windows logon screen. Right?

 

the sleep issue I have been seeing with all of the verde drivers has been when waking, its to a blank screen with only the mouse pointer visible - i dont even make it to the login screen... lol. Basically, I have to zero out the sleep timer in the power settings and remember to shutdown instead of just closing the lid.

 

Yeah, I guess the exact severity of the symptoms will vary. Heh.

Well, I look forward to some developments. And hell, if I can help, I'll try. Bloody Nvidia and their change of profile scheme.

 

DPC issue did cause horrible sound problems in games like Fallout though. The crackling on the radio was so bad I had to turn it off.

 

Might as well reiterate here that 260.99 is unstable on this R2. System usually freezes during gaming within an hour, and the driver has a habit of failing then recovering when on the desktop.

 

ahhh... very interesting. So which driver is used on the R2 w/285's?