Anyone tried the new 340.43 nVidia drivers?

I'm having a go. I have working 880Ms. I'll report back if they're still working lmao.

 

So far so good... Seem to be slightly faster than the 337 drivers and my cards actually downclock to their 2D clocks when I'm not gaming instead of getting stuck like they were before.

EDIT: Watch Dogs played with full fans, optimized using GeForce Experience: 993.7MHz continuous boost on both cards (using OSD with HWiNFO64 and RTSS), no lag, max temp 78C on secondary card, 72C on primary.

No crashes or weird slowdowns or anything.

These drivers appear to be optimized quite well for these cards - nVidia's optimal settings had a pretty consistent 60FPS with a few dips to the mid 50s and a very rare dip to 50-54. Totally fluid pretty much the entire time.

Those temps surprised me to be honest. As expected, kicking the fans to automatic control let the temps go to 87C with a large reduction in noise and no further temperature increase. That's the stock vbios and since its boosting, I don't feel the need to test with the modded vbios.

As expected, turning on MSAA 4x caused the second card to start throttling because it hit the power limit so they still have a throttle in place, it just isn't there if games are run with nVidia's optimal game settings. I see little reason to deviate from those settings though because they are pretty high for every game. SMAA is more than enough for Watch Dogs and every other game I have is maxed beyond 120FPS so I use global adaptive vsync to keep temps low on those titles.

Anyway, I guess I can play Watch Dogs on my laptop again

EDIT2: Driver crashed 5 minutes into Bioshock Infinite. That could be because of my custom application settings (forced FXAA, 16xCSAA, 16xAF, High Quality Textures) but its something I'll keep my eye on. For now, I removed the FXAA and CSAA and left the 16xAF since that worked on the old driver. I don't have any more time to play tonight, I'll check it again tomorrow.

 

I tried the 340 drivers, and it looks like it reduces my temps a bit. But mine are still way too high, up to 90 degrees. Games seem to perform better though.

 

Thanks guys. I am very careful around new driver releases after reading about all the beta 340 stuff that happened. Granted that was a beta but it didn't sound good at all.

Maybe after a few more good posts and no bad ones I will give them a try. So far I like the 337's but I'm always willing to take free improvements.

 

Well the good news is that these don't cripple the 880Ms.

The bad news is that I'm having some random glitches with them.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the bottom half of the screen flickers and then the Bioshock crash.

The problem is that XCOM is a new game (I purchased the Humble Bundle yesterday and it was one of the games included with it) so I don't have any behavior to go by on previous drivers. I'll have to test that later. The game black screened on me a few times and when I closed the game, I had a DX error suggesting the driver crashed during those moments but since it was fullscreen, the game remained on top. That could easily cause the flashing behavior so it looks like that was a crash as well but somehow the game recovered and kept going.

Watch Dogs does appear to perform better with the new drivers, at least on my 880Ms. There are reports on nVidia's site of more issues with the 340.43 drivers and Watch Dogs than with 337, its very much a YMMV situation.

Then there is the Bioshock crash. I am not sure if the driver crash was caused by my modifying the settings so much or driver instability but combined with the XCOM crash, it isn't looking great. I just got Humble's 24 hour bundle so I have a bunch of new games including three Overlord games and Dirt 3 so I have more testing to do once Steam finishes downloading the 7 new games. I'll report back if I have any issues.

Watch Dogs is quickly becoming one of my least favorite games because of the issues it is plagued with so if 340 breaks other games but fixes that one, I'll gladly sacrifice it and go back to 337 or even back to 332.35 that was working fine on my system before these 340 drivers.

 

Dirt 3: Flicker at the bottom of the screen

Dirt Showdown: No issues

Overlord II: Flicker and crash.

Going back to 337...

 

I'm having no problems with the games I play, albeit they're not really that graphics intensive. (War Thunder, World of Tanks, Hawken, GRID)

 

Glad its working for you. I went to 337.38 and every issue stopped but when I went to 340.43 from 332.35, I didn't use DDU (shame on me, I know) so that could possibly have caused additional issues. 337 was a clean install after a full DDU this time around - kinda doesn't make sense not to do a full DDU when this machine takes 10 seconds to shut down and reboot.

 

Are these the same beta drivers that everyone had issues with recently? Or maybe a new beta driver?

I thought hey were new release drivers but I went looking for them last night and didn't find anything newer than 337's

 

I have tried these drivers recently with great results. I was on the latest non bets drivers before (I let the GeForce experience install them) and I had stuttering in metro last light. After installing beta, it is smooth and I can turn up some settings.

I have the W230ss with the 860m.

Edit - haven't had time to try much else yet, other than Fallout NV, and it plays well also.