8800 ForceWare for Windows XP emerges

RATHER THAN using the beta ForceWares, which are now up in the 100s, GeForce 8800 users running Windows XP have got a new version of the official release drivers to play with, dubbed version 97.94.

There aren't too many big differences here, and if you're running all your games happily, you're not going to find much of a reason to upgrade. There's a new performance profile for the Titan Quest demo, there's a fix for 1080i MPEG2 playback and Company of Heroes now works properly in SLI when AA is set to 4x or 8x.

However, if you haven't previously been using 97.92 beta, you'll find a wad more fixes in Splinter Cell: Double Agent, Oblivion and Hitman: Contracts. Additionally, Nvidia seems to have fixed a truly spectacular bug, which resulted in SLI profiles for a game being ignored if Valve's Steam software was running in the background. Genius, it's not like every gamer has that running. D'oh!

You can grab the drivers, which are 39.2MB, from here. µ