I was hoping someone could shed some light on this situation for me as it has me stumped! I upgraded to the 301.xx Certified drivers from the Nvidia site a month or so back and had some issues, for example the screen would randomly go black even when browsing in Windows and I would be forced to hard power my laptop off and back on before it would reappear! Some time after I installed these drivers I bought Skyrim through Steam, installed it and ran the Auto-Detection in Skyrims setup which set default to HIGH and most bars for view distance were about half to 3 quarters across, AF and AA were 8. I could play Skyrim pretty well with these settings just some outdoor environments like the Tundra would see my FPS dip to under 30 for a few seconds!

Now just today I uninstalled the 301 display drivers due to the above blank screen issue (I am hoping that is what caused it because it never did it before I updated my drivers) and re-installed the previous WHQL certified display drivers from Nvidia (296.10) did a clean install (rebooted into Safe Mode and did a driver-sweep) . I loaded up Skyrim and it said it would Auto-Detect my system again, this time however it set everything to ULTRA with all the view distance bars all the way across to full, AF to 16 and AA to 10! How can this be? Was my previous display driver installation corrupted or something? Strange... I loaded up Skyrim thinking it would run like a dog, but to my surprise it was running smooth, 30-70 fps! This is on a Asus G74SX Gaming Laptop, 8 Gig of DDR3 1333 Ram, Nvidia 560M GTX 3GB, and an I7-2630QM (overclocks itself to 3.0gighz).

I am very confused, the difference in visual quality is staggering and I haven't changed anything else in my system between the 2 driver installs! Can a dodgy display driver install really do this?

Thanks!