GeForce Driver 352.86 WHQL {DO NOT USE DEGRADED PERFORMANCE BY 50%}

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/85053/en-us

Before downloading this driver:

1. 
   Use Display Driver Uninstaller

Just in time for the highly anticipated title The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, this new GeForce Game Ready driver ensures you'll have the best possible gaming experience. With support for GeForce SLI technology and one-click game setting optimizations within GeForce Experience, you’ll have the best possible performance and image quality during gameplay.

Game Ready
Best gaming experience for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, including support for SLI Technology and GeForce Experience 1-click optimizations

 

Do you know if it's still clockblocking under newer BIOS ?
Any general improvements, or is it strictly Witcher3 optimization?

 

If your vBIOS is clockblocked this driver won't allow you to OC

 

It's ridiculous that Nvidia is getting away with this. I'm not affected since my vBIOS is a very early edition [84.04.22.00.0A], but it's really underhanded behavior by Nvidia.

 

This driver fixes SLI in Watch Dogs and Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. No more annoying workarounds or patch downgrading necessary. Better late than never, I guess.

 

Why would you use Display Driver Uninstaller? Just do a clean install and all is good. Using third party uninstaller is a thing of the past unless you do some voodoo or hacking of your drivers that goofs things up.

 

In case you're having issues. Clean install is decent but it doesn't remove all traces. DDU makes it "fresh out-of-box" like before you installed any driver.

 

I didn't use DDU this time I installed, but when I installed 305.12 I was having issues with traces of my old drivers showing up and it was causing weird issues while gaming. My 970 was downclocking under load for no reason. Did a DDU and fresh install and problem fixed.

 

because just uninstalling doesn't get rid of all the registry entries and any left over files.

 

DO NOT INSTALL THIS PIECE OF CRAP DRIVER!

I ran some benchmarks and found that it nearly halved the performance of my laptop. Scored (3DMark 11) P7297, which is worse than a 780M. After wiping this driver from the system and installing 347.88 (again), the score increased to P11998.

What the hell is NVIDIA doing?

 

i also think these driver are bad..i will revert to 350.12 which were okay for me

 

every new driver seems worse than the one before.....nVIDIA clowns giving us crap drivers

Because I don't trust the nVIDIA Jokers to properly clean up their mess.

Wow, just checked my FireStrike score with this new driver and it is exactly half the score of the previous driver(s)!

 

Yes, same for me. Do not use this!

@Ethrem should put "Warning!" in the title.

 

REPORTED for a mod to take care of this

 

352.86 (before): http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/9832980

347.88 (after): http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/9833063

Absolutely ridiculous. I went through the system as if it was a virus and removed all traces of it, LOL. Don't want anything to do with this!

 

Bloody hell! that does seem like a virus ind33d!

 

So it lowered benchmark scores, but what about real games?

I'm getting 60fps in Witcher 3.

 

My in-game performance actually increased by a noticeable amount.

I posted a Witcher 3 gameplay video yesterday on YouTube using this crappy driver. I'm uploading more now with the better driver.

 

The drivers are optimized for particular games, I would speculate either older drivers were more optimized for 3D benchmarks, or new optimizations for Witcher3 etc. don't work too well with older 3D benchmarks. Are we going to have to install different drivers for different games in near future?

 

Which better driver?

BTW this driver is absolute feces... The minute you OC the thing throttles.. Even in Optimus mode... Wtf is NVIDIA trying to pull?

 

Using 347.88 with The Witcher 3 works better than this one. I think the only benefit this will have is SLI. You'll need it for that, probably.

 

Well, something's wonky and it's inconsistently wonky because I'm not having any problems with 352.86:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/official-clevo-p75xzm-batman-sager-np9752-owner´s-lounge-welcome-to-the-batcave.767105/page-658#post-10008048
I will, however, try version 347.88.

With 347.88 I get 8314:
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7034355?
And with 345.20 I get 8257 along with a "graphics driver is not approved" warning. My 980M comes with a locked vBIOS so I can't muck with the clock. It's tempting me to install a Prema vBIOS just to see if overclocking causes me the same problems.

 

I've highlighted the issues with this driver and 350.12 in a multiple threads. It's a piece of crap. That seems to be status quo for NVIDIA drivers for a good while now. I'm sticking with 345.20... no drama. You can install this new driver over the top of the old one, export the new game profiles (Witcher 3, GTA V, etc) individually with NVIDIA Inspector and go back to the driver you were using before and import those profiles. No real need to use DDU.

Look here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/witcher-3-wild-hunt.776195/page-3#post-10007551

GeForce Forums is also filled with bad reports, much like it was with the 350.12 garbage driver.
Look here: https://forums.geforce.com/default/...hread-released-5-18-15-/post/4533524/#4533524

 

Since you are the OP, you can change thread title yourself. No need for a mod to do it.

 

Was curious, so just did a quick 3DMark11 run. Using these latest drivers, the score was a bit lower (P8791) compared to previous scores (P91xx range) but not terribly so. This is with all stock settings. Definitely not faster, but no where near 50% loss, more like ~5% on my machine. So, seems mileage may vary. Additionally, Witcher 3 is running well, but I haven't tried it with previous drivers so no idea how that compares.

If other issues pop up I'll roll back, but as I'll be playing Witcher 3 mainly for now I'll stick with them.

 

Not after a certain time has passed from posting the original thread dawg

 

Nope, you still can. I just added "TEST" to the title of this thread I started back in February.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ed-in-347-88-reblocked-in-350-12-test.771900/

 

This is from another thread, but it fits here well.

 

Ah OK must've slipped me thanks for letting me know about this

 

All carrot and no stick. It's almost as though NVIDIA has stooped to AMD's level of driver support.

 

When was the last time you used an AMD GPU?

 

About a month ago (before I got my PC). I know they don't have the same problems, at least not yet. Just trying to make a point.

 

So "stooping to AMD's level of driver support" is a good thing?

 

so should we go back tothe 350.xx driver and see if the witcher 3 runs better?

btw, is it just crap for the 900m cards or crap overall?

 

I don't personally care if the driver crippled benchmark scores as long as actual game performance was increased.

 

Well, I was able to use a laptop with an R9 M295X for about 45 days and it was extremely unimpressive.

The desktop GPU scene is not nearly as bleak for the Red Team. I think the point is, things are starting to go south for NVIDIA at a progressive rate that more folks are beginning to notice. Having a heap more horsepower on tap is not as meaningful when everything NVIDIA touches ends up broken or crippled. So, now both of them suck instead of just one of them. That is a big change, and a recent development for NVIDIA, but status quo for AMD. I'm not an advocate of either brand, but I know what I like and don't like. I don't like stuff that is messed up no matter what the source is and now it is starting to look like all of our options blow chunks. I'd jump to AMD in a heartbeat if they could provide something better to sink my overclocking teeth into. They cannot, so NVIDIA is an unworthy recipient of tolerance, mixed with angst and contempt, as the lesser of two evils. Not my idea of a good time.

 

Is driver 352.86 crippled on a single gtx780m?

 

It is for me with one 780M, but since 350.12 worked OK for you, then you should try 352.86 and see if it works OK. A lot of people are having issues with both of those drivers, but some find it to work fine.

 

Tests maybe later today or tomorrow. It is alarming that the latest drivers working on some laptops but not on others with same graphics (poor performance with oc). Could this be any worse? Nvidia starts to become the new AMD. Tragic. All this nonsense began when Nvidia launched Maxwell. Why should Kepler get such problems? Did you test this driver with your AW18 such as Matrix leader also did without success(both singel and in sli)?

 

That's a funny thing: I wasn't able to reproduce the benchmark degradation.

I installed Prema's OC vBIOS for my 980M then ran Heaven and Firestrike against it with 347.88 and 352.86 notebook drivers at stock clocks and at +120MHz Base and +300MHz Mem. 347.88 was installed immediately after the flash which in turn was after using DDU to completely remove all of Nvidia's code. 352.86 was installed over 347.88.

Heaven scored 4278 and 4310 with stock clocks, 4644 and 4723 with those OC settings. My stock Firestrike scores are posted over in the Batman thread. With OC it scored 9219 and 9263. I think the numbers are within reasonable margins of variance.

Firestrike crashed on the combined test the first time with boosted clocks on 353.86. The driver stopped responding and then recovered. It worked the second time.

 

The question is... What if you're using the stock vbios?

 

My stock vBIOS is locked.

 

No my point is that it may be an issue plaguing the stock vbios and not the mod.

 

FPS was better with 347.88 over 352.86 in The Witcher 3. The average increased by about 4-5 FPS because there were less dips with 347.88. It's not a huge difference, but if you monitor the FPS closely, you'll notice this as well - much better consistency. Every FPS counts when we're talking numbers below 60.

I've recorded both. 352.86 gameplay is already uploaded and awaiting processing. Gameplay with 347.88 is uploading now. It should be up by midnight.

 

Ah, I see. My benchmark scores with the stock firmware (I really do hate writing "vBIOS") are consistent with those with Prema's firmware. That's not conclusive since the problem appears to be associated with overclocking and I can't test that against the stock firmware that I have.

 

Yeah I lost my stock firmware so I'm on the locked one...

 

too bad new drivers are far away.One month till batman game

 

Since both AMD and Nvidia drivers suck, why not Intel? Maybe S3 or VIA? Qualcomm?

 

Their hardware suck

 

The stock vBIOS on premamod.com has no clock block, so you can test +135Mhz OC with that, too.