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HEXUS.net - News :: NVIDIA launches feature-packed GeForce 180 "Big Bang II" drivers : Page - 1/2

Cast your memory back and you'll recall that NVIDIA's first so-called "Big Bang" driver release signalled the arrival of its SLI technology.

Today, the graphics giant is following up with "Big Bang II" in the form of its GeForce 180.42 drivers, and there's a handful of very-useful additions - but is it enough to warrant the Big Bang alias?

Put simply, the GeForce 180 drivers offer three significant enhancements; improved performance, support for multi-display SLI, and the option for users to dedicate a specific GPU to PhysX calculations.

The improved performance - which we tend to see with most driver releases, be they Big Bangs or not - boasts gains of up to 40 per cent in titles such as Far Cry 2, but users should expect less than 10 per cent in most other games.

Multi-display SLI, which undoubtedly is the driver's key and long-overdue feature, finally allows users to configure two, four or six displays depending on their system hardware. There is, however, a caveat - should you have two or three SLI'd GPUs, only the first can be connected to monitors, theoretically limiting a user to two displays.

If more monitors are required, they can be connected to another GPU outside of the SLI configuration. Herein lies another problem, that extra GPU must be different to the GPUs found in the SLI setup. Confused? Here's the diagram:

HEXUS.net - News :: NVIDIA launches feature-packed GeForce 180 "Big Bang II" drivers : Page - 2/2

Another big feature to make the release is a PhysX configuration page in the NVIDIA control panel. The provided options allow PhysX acceleration to be enabled or disabled, and offloaded to a dedicated GPU. The idea is to allow users to add a reasonably-cheap GPU, say a GeForce 9600 GT, to an existing setup and use it solely for PhysX calculations. The performance boost, says NVIDIA, could be as much as 42 per cent.

The three upgrades are all useful, if perhaps not quite to Big Bang standards. NVIDIA, though, has managed to slip something else into the GeForce 180 drivers - support for Intel's upcoming X58 chipset, which will be taking advantage of Core i7 processors sometime next month.

NVIDIA assures us that SLI will be readily available on X58 offerings from all the big-name motherboard manufacturers except one; Intel. Native SLI configurations of two-slot x16 x16, three-slot x16, x8, x8 and four-slot x8, x8, x8, x8 will all be available at launch.

In addition, motherboards using NVIDIA's nForce 200 SLI bridging chip will raise the bar further with support for three-slot x16, x16, x16 and four slot x16, x16, x16, x16 - at a premium price, mind you.

The result, says NVIDIA, is AMD-spanking performance when it comes to multi-GPU scaling: