curious to see if the community was using the nvdia beta driver or the current official driver. and if there were any differences

i'd be more curious to know if anyone using a graphics card say 560GTX is playing oblivion with no hard crash's am i right in thinking Skyrim is made with same game engine just a bit tarted up.

I've read that people using the Beta, had some problems fixed but then it caused a BSOD. I'd stick with 285.62 drivers for now until the Beta drivers become official. I'm using old 275 drivers still and I encounter the weird FPS drop after about an hour of play, only outside, makes me shut down the game to get everything back to normal. Not sure if the 285.62 drivers/beta drivers fixes that or not.

Obvlion use the Gamebryo engine, Skyrim is using Bethesda's proprietary Creation engine. This is most likely why there are so many issues, new game engine new problems.

I am using the nVidia beta drivers, but still have random crashes and frame rate drops for no reason.

Ya im the using the beta drivers and getting alot of random crashes. Gonna roll back to the officals and see if that makes a big difference.

I've been using the BETA 285.79 drivers on a SLI setup. I have 2x EVGA GTX 460 SC. I noticed I haven't had problems with random game crashes, but I did have a BSOD at some point when I was away from my computer for several hours. I run science computations through BOINC in the background (when not playing games) so the BSOD could be related to CUDA issues.

Beta drivers here and performance is the same.

Beta 285.79 for the nVidia GTX 560 Ti. The beta is a little better but the game is still unplayable for me.

creation is just modified gamebryo

Creation engine is just a heavily modified Gamebryo engine, they said they changed so many things in it that it might aswell be a new engine overall. But in the core its still Gamebryo

Using XtreamG tweaked driver for a year......Driver version....266.66 On EVGA 560TI

This driver has played every game I can throw at it. Never fails me. On release day I installed Skyrim and promptly played an http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee72/camaro_69_327/Skyrim/Skyrim8hrs.png <<<

Edit: Newest is not always best...lol

I'm still on 280.26 since every further iteration has seemed to reduce performance. I'll probably try the first post-Skyrim certified driver however.

As far as I know, the beta driver only added an SLI profile, not any specific performance optimizations.

I am downloading 285.79 as I type... let you know if it improves anything but I won't be betting the farm on it.

I get what I call the A-bug where the animation slows and I have to shut down. I reboot and start again and it seems to last a couple of hours more before it happens again. It's not a big deal because that clears it up and I can still play but it'll be nice when they patch that. I'm using the Nvidia 460M with the 280.26 driver and have only had one crash when I first got the game so really, not having a crashing problem...only that animation problem.

well i downloaded the official version and noticed that the world has to "load". whereas on the beta one its already per-loaded. i might have switched up some options that i didn't noticed, but if i haven't that's the case so far...

It was already said a couple times, but the engine isn't really different. It's a modified FO3 engine renamed to 'creation'

It is still gamebryo at it's core. Bethesda built Morrowind around a dx8 middleware called netimmerse. gamebryo was the dx9 version of netimmerse. Bethesda licensed it in 2006 for Oblivion, updated their Morrowind SDK to use the new features, wrote some of their own shaders, and integrated other engines with it like facegen, speedtree, and havoc. They never licensed any other versions of gamebryo except the 2006 one in favoring of making their own modifications and enhancements seen in FO3. I am guessing they have made enough modifications to call it their own, which they did (creation). In 2009 there was an interview that said they're going to use it for future products because they've built all their tools around it and their staff is so familiar with it. The performance quirks people like to blame on the gamebryo engine are not the engine's fault. It's the programmers. And mostly due to its open world nature. Other games used gamebryo without as many bugs and quirks (and they had ladders too).

I can't speak to any specific information for Skyrim, but its quite possible that the "bug fixes and performance updates for battlefield 3" that are mentioned, could also affect other games using shared code / lib fuctions. Its just speculation on my part, but as a software engineer i know that release notes are prepared weeks in advance of an actual release and not every detail is mentioned. Its likely that the fix was put in for DICE for battlefield 3 and it just so happens that these fixes can affect other games using similar driver features or DX11/DX10 APIs. The engineers aren't aware of all the games out there that will use these APIs so the release notes are just based off of the reporter of the bugs. I'm not saying Bethesda doesn't have bugs in their game, but I wouldn't take patch notes at face value.

I think with any of these driver updates, if you're having problems you might as well black box test it to see what's different. Worst that can happen is you still can't play the game. I did this and I feel like these beta drivers improved game stability for my hardware configuration.

Just my 2 cents here.

I am using the beta driver, playing in 5760 X 1200 surround. Good framerates, not a single crash so far (fingers crossed). I cannot give you a comparison between the betas and the previous/present WHQL driver as I installed the beta and tested it for normal computer use before I installed SKYRIM. For surround I am using a modded ini set to my resolution and the surround menu fix from HayDen on Wide Screen Gaming. http://widescreengamingforum.com/forum/forums/multi-monitor-gaming/multi-monitor-gaming/18156/eyefinity-skyrim-confirmed-hor-broken-m

I use the beta drivers because it had a Skyrim SLI profile.

Haven't had Skyrim crash on me - character is at Level 24 to give you a sense of playtime. vOv