It has only been a few hours since Nvidia released its latest WHQL-candidate beta drivers for its GeForce 8, 9, and GTX 200 series desktop GPUs, as well as a new PhysX driver for these cards and Ageia PhysX cards.

Nvidia is claiming that its new 182.05 WHQL-candidate drivers will give noticeable performance gains over the popular 181.22 WHQL drivers depending on the GPU configuration, system configuration, and game settings used.

From the release notes:

Up to 8% performance increase in Fallout 3 at high resolution and AA.

Up to 10% performance increase in F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.

Up to 9% performance increase in Half-Life 2 at high resolution with AA.

Up to 11% performance increase in Left 4 Dead at high resolution with AA.

Up to 10% performance increase in Race Driver: GRID at high resolution and AA.

The first thing we’ve noticed is that these drivers are the first to add support for F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin which releases today in North America.  However, there is still no support for Ambient Occlusion in this release.

Additionally, these drivers come with PhysX 9.09.0203 WHQL, which is supposed to resolve some installation issues from 9.09.0121 on non-English systems.  Performance in some PhysX-enabled games on the GTX 285 and GTX 295 has also been improved, and PhysX SDK runtime issues with multi-GPU configurations in Hybrid environments have also been addressed.  Yet more importantly, the update resolves occasional system crashes when PhysX is enabled in some systems running Mirror’s Edge.

Furthermore, the drivers were released on February 10th and can be downloaded here:

GeForce 182.05 Vista 64-bit

GeForce 182.05 Vista 32-bit

GeForce 182.05 XP 64-bit

GeForce 182.05 XP 32-bit