NVIDIA releases ForceWare 77.76 beta

NVIDIA today released new ForceWare 77.76 beta drivers which support some new features. Firstly this driver adds bridgeless SLI modes for the GeForce 6600 and GeForce 6600 LE cards. The second major improvement is SLI Antialiasing (SLI AA).

I noticed NV News has already posted a short writetup and some pictures on the new 8x SLI AA and 16x SLI AA modes. Even more image quality tests can be found at HotHardware. However, SLI Antialiasing still needs to be enabled with Coolbits. NVIDIA says the next ForceWare driver will make SLI AA a permanent feature in the NVIDIA control panel.


Here's a short list of changes in this release (a full list can be found here):

• SLI support for GeForce 6600 and GeForce 6600 LE
• New SLI rendering mode (SLI Antialiasing) for increased antialiasing performance
• Broader SLI optimizations and validation for the latest games
• Issues resolved since ForceWare 77.72
  • "Overbright" color issue affecting video playback
  • GeForce 7800 GTX clock reduction when using extremely cold temperatures to cool the GPU
  • For a full list of other issues resolved, please view the driver release notes.
• Microsoft DirectX 9.0c and OpenGL 1.5 support

One of the surprising things is that NVIDIA now altered the GeForce 7800 GTX to enter “high temperature” GPU clock speed slowdown mode at extremely cold temperatures (less than -10 degrees C). They also fixed some bugs and fixed a memory allocation issue for all GPUs that caused general instability in a variety of games.

The 77.76 beta driver can be downloaded here.