Recently we reported you about NVIDIA’s v180.84 driver release. Although it has only been a few days since the last release, apparently you can now download the v181.00 BETA drivers for Windows XP 32-bit and Windows Vista 32/64-bit operating systems. The significance of this release is that these drivers support OpenGL 3.0 extensions. 181.00 drivers are dated 12/15/2008 and carry the version number 6.14.11.8100. If you are a Linux user, you can download v180.11.02 drivers which also feature OpenGL 3.0 support.
From what I have seen these drivers are compatible with Geforce 6 series cards and above. But to enjoy OpenGL 3.0 features, you need to have a Geforce 8 series or a newer GPU (G80 core or newer). I did not have the time to test these out with any games so far so I cannot really comment about their performance. Note that these are still beta drivers so proceed at your own risk. You can read the full release notes from this link.
Download (Obtained from NVIDIA Developer Zone)
Windows
Linux
- Download for XFree86 32-bit (Right-Click to Save)
- Download for XFree86 64-bit (Right-Click to Save)
- Download for Solaris (Right-Click to Save)
- Download for FreeBSD
As of this moment, there is no Windows XP 64-bit release of 181.00 drivers.
