Nvidia has just released its first WHQL certified set of drivers for the Geforce 185 driver family, bringing official support for some awesome features to Geforce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, and 200-series desktop GPUs as well as the ION platform.

One of the major implementations of the Geforce 185 family is that it brings official support for the Windows 7 operating system, including support for its new GPU-accelerated DirectX APIs. It also brings much anticipated support for great features such as OpenGL 3.0, CUDA 2.2, Ambient Occlusion, and Compute-based DVD upscaling.

According to Nvidia, the Geforce 185 driver family promises the following performance improvements over the 181 series:

Up to 25 percent performance increase in The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
Up to 22 percent performance increase in Crysis: Warhead with antialiasing enabled
Up to 11 percent performance increase in Fallout 3 with antialiasing enabled
Up to 14 percent performance increase in Far Cry 2
Up to 30 percent performance increase in Half-Life 2 engine games with 3-way and 4-way SLI
Up to 45 percent performance increase in Mirror’s Edge with antialiasing enabled

It is important to note that there should not be a difference between Geforce 185.81 beta and Geforce 185.85 WHQL other than the transition from beta to certified. After looking through both release notes, they seem to be identical. However, Nvidia notes that the Control Panel erroneously reports the PhysX software version in 185.85 WHQL as 9.09.0203, when the installed version is in fact 9.09.0408.



The Geforce 185.85 WHQL driver can be downloaded for XP, Vista and 7 in all 32-bit and 64-bit flavors:

Geforce 185.85 WHQL – Windows 7 64-bit
Geforce 185.85 WHQL – Windows 7 32-bit
Geforce 185.85 WHQL – Windows Vista 64-bit
Geforce 185.85 WHQL – Windows Vista 32-bit
Geforce 185.85 WHQL – Windows XP 64-bit
Geforce 185.85 WHQL – Windows XP 32-bit