NVIDIA 344.11 & 344.16 Drivers Available
by Jarred Walton on September 19, 2014 3:40 PM EST
In the crazy rush to wrap up the GeForce GTX 980 review in time for the NDA lift yesterday, news of the first R343 driver release may have been lost in the shuffle. This is a full WHQL driver release from NVIDIA, and it's available for Windows 8.1, 7, Vista, and even XP (though I don't know what you'd be doing with a modern GPU on XP at this point). Notebooks also get the new drivers, though only for Windows 7 and 8 it seems. You can find the updates at the usual place, or they're also available through GeForce Experience (which has also been updated to version 2.1.2.0 if you're wondering).
In terms of what the driver update provides, this is the Game Ready driver for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, The Evil Within, F1 2014, and Alien: Isolation – all games that are due to launch in early to mid-October. Of course this is also the publicly available driver for the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970, which are apparently selling like hotcakes based on the number of "out of stock" notifications we're seeing (not to mention some hefty price gouging on the GTX 970 and GTX 980).
The drivers also enable NVIDIA's new DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution), with hooks for individual games available in the Control Panel->Manage 3D Settings section. It's not clear whether DSR will be available for other GPUs, but it's definitely not enabled on my GTX 780 right now and I suspect it will be limited to the new Maxwell GM204 GPUs for at least a little while.
There are a host of other updates, too numerous to go into, but you can check the release notes for additional information. These drivers also drop support for legacy GPUs (anything from the 300 series and older), so if you're running an older GPU you'll need to stay with the previous driver release.
Update: 334.16 is now available for the GTX 900 series. These drivers include the fixes to resolve the compatibility issues we were seeing with the GTX 970
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StealthGhost - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
Working fine for me so far. 570 and Windows 8.1. I would try Guru3d's driver cleaner (or something similar) and redownload and install.ellroy80 - Saturday, September 20, 2014 - link
Jarrod, can you go into more detail about the compatibility issues you encountered with the 970?CrystalBay - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
Please respond Jarred or Ryan !JarredWalton - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
Ryan would have to confirm, but I think the issue might be that for some reason the drivers didn't play well with GTX 970 on his LGA2011 test bed. Most users are on LGA1150/1155, so it may not have been experienced by other sites. Anyway, it sounds like 970 is now working for Ryan so the review/performance will be up likely in the next day or so (and probably a slightly better explanation of what went wrong).StealthGhost - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
Glad to hear about the 334.16 update addressing the GTX 970 issues, hopefully Anandtech's review will be up soon then.I for one would love to know about the OC ability and SLi scaling for the GTX 970 if possible. I know the OC ability was in the 980 review and it makes me want to compare it to the 970.
Senti - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
And the OpenCL is still broken (since 332.21). Way to go, nVidia, instead of implementing 1.2 you managed to break the once working 1.1.There are some OpenGL issues too, but they can be worked around unlike OpenCL ones.
Senti - Sunday, September 21, 2014 - link
Edit: I meant 332 was the last working series.croc - Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - link
Just a wee note... The versions of the new driver are 344, not 334. And for anyone using an ENB graphics mod for your game, beware the geforce experience 2.1.2.x for the moment. It seems to have broken something.Inventor14 - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
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