Today, NVIDIA announced the release of GeForce 304.79 Beta Drivers, stating it as an essential Upgrade for gamers playing Funcom’s much-anticipated MMORPG, The Secret World. The new NVIDIA GeForce 304.79 beta drivers are now available to download and these GeForce 304.79 beta drivers introduce TXAA anti-aliasing functionality (GeForce GTX 600-series Kepler-Based GPUs), pending a game update, and add a SLI profile for multi-GPU users.
Nvidia also included a number of new SLI profiles for other titles, and resolved several issues reported by users of the GeForce 304.48 beta drivers, released June 18th.Furthermore, the GeForce 304.79 beta drivers are the first unified R304 drivers, with full notebook and desktop Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 support.
The main update in the drivers is most cetainly the addition of TXAA. NVIDIA TXAA is new film-style anti-aliasing technique designed specifically to reduce temporal aliasing (crawling and flickering in motion) through a combination of hardware AA, custom CG film style AA resolve, and a temporal filter. The Secret World by Funcom will be the first game to support TXAA.
TXAA Anti-Aliasing
At the launch of the GeForce GTX 680, our flagship GPU, NVIDIA announced TXAA Anti-Aliasing, a new anti-aliasing technique offering higher levels of fidelity than MSAA and FXAA. Exclusive to GeForce GTX 600-Series GPUs, this anti-aliasing technique not only reduces the level of aliased stepping on edges and lines far beyond that of MSAA, but also reduces temporal aliasing to a significant degree. More commonly known as shimmering, temporal aliasing is typically seen on chain-link fences and other surfaces when the player’s camera moves, and with this addition TXAA approaches the level of fidelity seen to date only in big-budget CG movies.
The first title to support TXAA is Funcom’s The Secret World, the most graphically advanced MMO to date. Following an upcoming game update, all GeForce GTX 600-Series users who have the new GeForce 304.79 beta drivers installed will be able to take immediate advantage of the fidelity-enhancing anti-aliasing technique to make Funcom’s fantastic-looking MMORPG look even better.
New & Updated SLI Profiles
The new GeForce 304.79 beta drivers also introduce a Secret World SLI profile, maximizing frame rates on multi-GPU systems. Furthermore, profiles for other top titles are also included:
- End of Nations
- Nexuiz (released at an earlier date via NVIDIA Update)
- Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier (released at an earlier date via NVIDIA Update)
- Tornado Force
- Tribes: Ascend (updated)
Resolved Issues
The new driver resolves many of the issues reported by users of our previous GeForce 304.48 beta drivers, such as systems rebooting instead of shutting down. The key fixes are as follows, with the complete list of Windows 7 and Windows 8 changes available to pursue in the driver notes, here.
- Fixed a compatibility issue with Civilization V and GeForce 400/500 series GPUs.
- Fixed instances of flickering or missing mouse cursor when hardware cursor is enabled (reported with Aion, World of Warcraft, Eve Online and others).
- Fixed an issue that caused a PC reboot instead of a PC shut down.
- Fixed an issue that led to a black screen after driver installation.
Download: GeForce 304.79 beta drivers