Nvidia has recently released new Geforce 295.73 WHQL drivers, the first official release from the R295 family of drivers.

The Geforce 295.73 drivers are dated February 9, 2012 and include support for Geforce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 Series desktop cards. The package also comes bundled with new PhysX 9.12.0209 and HD Audio 1.3.12.0 software updates.

 

Nvidia's driver engineering team has been hard at work over the past few months enhancing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim experience for its Geforce GPU users. In December, the Geforce 290.53 Beta driver helped improve framerates by about 19-percent in Skyrim's many shadowy dungeons and 2.8-percent in the outdoor open environment. With the new Geforce 295.73 WHQL driver, average performance improvements on the Geforce GTX 560 increased by about 44.5-percent, allowing the midrange card to make full use of Skyrim's "Ultra" graphics setting.



Geforce 285.62 WHQL versus Geforce 295.73 WHQL performance in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Nevertheless, the new Geforce 295.73 WHQL release brings major SLI improvements for Mass Effect 3 with up to 2x performance gains by utilizing the latest SLI profile. The new drivers also bring new 3D Vision and SLI profiles for over 50 titles and include graphics quality enhancements with Ambient Occlusion (AO) support for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Diablo III and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.



Nvidia has published a comparative Ambient Occlusion (AO) demonstration for Skyrim that can be found here.

Of course, for 3D Vision users, there is also a new 3D crosshair for Skyrim that better matches the game's default 2D crosshair, helping to improve upon the 3D Vision experience. To enable it, use the Ctrl + F12 crosshair shortcut in-game, and then disable Skyrim's 2D crosshair in the Settings menu.

Nvidia Geforce 295.51 Beta Release Notes can be found here, and the drivers can be downloaded below:

Geforce 295.73 WHQL (Windows 7 / Vista 64-bit)

Geforce 295.73 WHQL (Windows 7 / Vista 32-bit)

Geforce 295.73 WHQL (Windows XP 64-bit)

Geforce 295.73 WHQL (Windows XP 32-bit)