Just in time for the release of Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag and Need for Speed: Rivals, NVIDIA has an updated driver available. The 331.82 driver builds on the current R331 drivers, which added support for ShadowPlay and GameStream for SHIELD owners. The new release also includes all the previous updates, which included optimizations for Battlefield 4, Batman: Arkham Origins, and Call of Duty: Ghosts. You can find the full release notes on NVIDIA’s site, as usual.

I just finished the Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag download, a paltry 22.5 GiB download (thank goodness for high-speed Internet!), But unfortunately I have too much on my plate to really spend any time with the game right now. ACIV is one of the titles that comes with some of NVIDIA’s latest GPUs, so it’s not too surprising that it’s getting a “game ready” driver release. But what we would really like to see is some additional new games with built-in benchmarking support.

Yes, 2013 is coming to a close, so we’ll be going through our annual “let’s discuss updates to our gaming benchmark suite” debates in the near future. If you have any recommendations, feel free to sound off in the comments. As for the 331.82 drivers, they’re available at NVIDIA’s site, with the regular 32-bit and 64-bit desktop and mobile versions for most current OSes. Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1 all have 331.82 available for desktop users (at least with the right GPU selection). Mobile users on the other hand are primarily relegated to Windows 7/8/8.1 with the latest 700M GPUs – which isn’t too surprising, considering I don’t know of any laptop or notebook shipped in the past several years that hasn’t included at least Windows 7 as the OS.

It’s likely just a bug in their web site right now, but oddly enough the GTX 780 isn’t showing any drivers on several OSes (and there are probably other GPUs that aren’t properly listing the latest drivers either). If you can’t seem to find any drivers for your particular GPU, try searching for a similar model (e.g. GTX 770), or else check for driver updates via GeForce Experience.

Source: NVIDIA Drivers

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  • techxx - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link

    Thumbs up NVIDIA. Aggressive driver updates lately.
  • ddriver - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link

    I just wish they were not so botched - I get frequent lock-ups - the monitor goes to sleep and it cannot awake no matter what I do, forcing me to restart the system the harsh way...

    This applies to literally EVERY driver version since 314.22, which is the last version unaffected by this bug, which is the version I am forced to stick to. The system is completely stable with it, while with every driver that followed it is just not reliable, it can lock up at any time, and usually does so in no to light GPU loads.

    And it is not like this is an isolated case, I've seen a ton of people complaining about the same issue to which nvidia remains indifferent. My next GPU will be a radeon...
  • jdon - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link

    I found a workaround for the monitor sleep, but it's not pretty. Disconnect the monitor from the system, wait for the disconnect sound, then plug it back in. Less than ideal, but if the driver's improvements positively impact you, it might be worth the effort.
  • ddriver - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link

    I don't really play games (very very rarely), much less the most recent ones, so I will stick to the old driver for the time being.

    But it is pathetic for nvidia to fail to resolve this rather significant issue for so long.
  • UltraTech79 - Monday, November 25, 2013 - link

    Why the hell would you even care about this then?
  • brainii - Friday, November 22, 2013 - link

    ddriver I have exactly the same issue. Any and all drivers (including beta versions) after 314.22 are buggy and cause my computer to randomly freeze at light GPU loads (i.e. when browsing the Web).

    The only solution is to turn power off and back on.
    I have a GTX 460 btw.

    IS there no solution to this and does the problem persist with newer graphics cards? I ordered a GTX760..
  • 0123210 - Friday, November 29, 2013 - link

    I also have a 460. Today I installed the latest drivers to play BF4 and decided to do some low load applications and it froze my computer. I am now back to the 314.22
  • oranos - Tuesday, November 26, 2013 - link

    thats your computer, not nvidia drivers.
  • MrSpadge - Tuesday, November 19, 2013 - link

    I hope they fixed the GP-GPU performance regression introduced in 331.58 and not corrected in 331.65!
    http://boinc.fzk.de/poem/forum_thread.php?id=1016&...
  • MrSpadge - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link

    No, still no joy. About 25% performance loss for POEM@Home on GT640!

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