The well-known designer and manufacturer of 3D graphics chips NVIDIA has released new GeForce drivers that boost performance under Bethesda’s newest game – The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
This is good news for gamers across the world running NVIDIA graphics cards. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the latest hit game title with Bethesda announcing sales of 10 million copies of the game for a total of 650 million dollars in sales and growing.
The new Skyrim-optimized GeForce graphics drivers come with version number 290.53. NVIDIA claims that FPS improvement can reach 25% in certain scenarios in comparison with the older GeForce 290.36 drivers.
Of course this depends on the system hardware and software the game runs on but the 25% boost was seen on systems with GeForce GTX 560 cards running at 1920×1200 on Ultra quality settings.
There’s something else though – NVIDIA admits that the 25% boost is the best case scenario. The improvement can be seen while playing indoors, while outside in the magnificent Skyrim world the improvement is only around 2-3%. Still, there is improvement and gamers can hardly complain about it especially having in mind that for the most part the game takes place indoors – in houses, caves etc.
There are other improvements in the 290.53 drivers. NVIDIA has improved the Ambient Occlusion – an Nvidia Control Panel quality setting that enables more realistic shadows – in comparison with drivers version 290.36. Also updated is the 3D Vision crosshair to better match Skyrim’s default 2D pointer.
Build 290.53 includes SLI profiles for Afterfall: InSanity, Trine 2 and WRC 2: FIA World Rally Championship 2011 along with new or updated 3D Vision profiles for Trine 2, Orcs Must Die!, Stronghold 3 and a few lesser-known titles.
The new drivers are available on NVIDIA’s web site.
Source: NVIDIA