NVIDIA GeForce 306.23 WHQL for Windows 8 (and older) is now out

NVIDIA issued the GeForce 306.23 driver, it's first WHQL-certified driver for Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 operating system, but it's also compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7. As always, you can find the driver via NVIDIA's driver download menu.

The company calls GeForce 306.23 an essential update for every GeForce GTX user because its the first non-beta driver with NVIDIA TXAA support. It's also the recommended driver for Borderlands 2 and World of Warcraft: Misters of Pandora, and other than that it comes with several performance enhancements vs the 301.41 WHQL driver, new NVIDIA SLI profiles, new NVIDIA 3D Vision profiles and other fixes.

NVIDIA also issues a warning that the GeForce 6 and GeForce 7 series graphics cards are moving to legacy support, starting with the GeForce R310 driver family, these old cards will no longer be supported.

This is the first WHQL-certified driver from the R304 family of drivers (304.xx to 306.xx) and the first WHQL-certified GeForce driver to combine support for Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Vista into a single driver package.

This is the recommended driver for the upcoming blockbuster PC games Borderlands 2 with PhysX and 3D Vision technology and World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria with 3D Vision and DirectX 11 support.

New in R304 Drivers:

GPU Support

Adds support for GeForce GTX 660 Ti, GeForce GTX 660, and GeForce GTX 650.

Legacy Support Notification: GeForce 6-series and GeForce 7-series GPUs will be moved to legacy support after GeForce R304 drivers. GeForce R310 drivers (the next major family of drivers) will not support these products.

Adds support for NVIDIA TXAA

NVIDIA TXAA is new film-style anti-aliasing technique designed specifically to reduce temporal aliasing (crawling and flickering in motion) through a combination of hardware AA, custom CG film style AA resolve, and a temporal filter.

The Secret World is the first game to support TXAA. Read about it on GeForce.com.

TXAA is supported on GeForce GTX 600-series Kepler-based GPUs.

Learn more about TXAA on GeForce.com.

Performance Boost – Increases performance for GeForce 400/500/600 Series GPUs in several PC games vs. GeForce 301.42 WHQL-certified drivers. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration:

GeForce GTX 680:

Up to 18% in Batman: Arkham City

Up to 15% in Dragon Age II

Up to 10% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

Up to 60% in Total War: Shogun 2 (fixes performance issue with latest game patch)

GeForce GTX 560:

Up to 14% in Batman: Arkham City

Up to 5% in Battlefield 3 with SLI

Up to 4% in Dragon Age II

Up to 8% in The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings with SLI

Up to 7% in Lost Planet 2