Nvidia just released a new beta driver, Just giving everyone the heads up if they hadn't seen it. Makes no mention of Skyrim improvement however.

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Sweet, thank you sir for the heads up.

If anyone is using it, they should let me know if there is any sort of improvement. I unfortunately can't DL it until after work. So I am getting anxious to know about the results!

The release notes for those drivers don't mention anything that might indicate a performance or stability improvement for Skyrim.

Indeed, that is what I said in my original post. There is always room for hope though.

I noticed nvidia has the links backwards for 32/64 bit vista/windows 7. Be sure to read the download page (where the driver is actually downloaded).

GeForce 295.51 beta for desktop GPUs: [http://www.geforce.com/Drivers/Results/41048] [http://www.geforce.com/Drivers/Results/41049]

I needed to click the 32 bit link to get the 64 bit driver ...

I'm using it right now. I'm not seeing any change either way that I can attribute to this particular driver...same as last beta, which was pretty good for my rig.

As an fyi, and with all the appropriate warnings, I just flashed my gpu bios and started a new round of overclocks for the 590. For modest increases in shader clock (achieved through careful steps with voltage...like, very careful), I was able to achieve quite a bit more headroom for some of Skyrim's goodies, like ENB, draw distances and the like. It didn't push the top end of my fps benchmarks much (have a limiter in place), but it cleaned up the low fps nicely...but the main reward was in smoother gameplay.

Someone mentioned on antoher thread that the beta drivers had a built-in FPS limiter. Is that something that was added with these drivers?

Not that I can find anywhere. Would be nice in future, but is a bit moot anyways, since 80% of people tinkering at that level are using nVidia Inspector anyways, which does have an fps limiter.

In the last beta, ambient occlusion had been much improved in most respects, but really glitchy in interiors. Anyone using that? Any better?

Thank you, that's what I thought.

I'm actually seeing an unexplained fps drop with this beta... 2-3 fps drop in comparison to previous betas.
Knowing that nvidia rarely improves performance, I've tested the same location before I update the driver and after.
Fps drop is bad but not really new for new nvidia drivers... Gonna test some more and probably go back to previous beta...

Skyrim runs fine but Windows just went all pink and the driver quit and restarted. Something is wonky with this beta as the other worked fine for weeks.

These drivers are not performance drivers.
If you spent time reading the previous driver thread on the geforce forums, it's mostly to fix TDR's.

Just download these latest drivers and latest version of Nvidia inspector. It has a built in FPS limiter fr every game installed on your OS. I tested it with skyrim by locking FPS at 30 and then running fraps in the background to see if it works. It works just fine. Only thing i noticed is that loading times are longer. like when you load a saved game or enter a new area.

You need to overclock 590? Isn't that their flagship model? I'm having no issues with a 560gtx.

Sorry if this might be a noob question, but what's a TDR?

TDR is a fancy way of saying the drivers crashed.
It stands for something like Timeout Display Refresh or something like that and can either cause the application that is using the graphics card to crash, kicking you back to windows or the system to completely crash. Either way, it makes a normal person RAGE when it happens.

Timeout detection and recovery. Heres a video of it happening:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXKj6Kw-VFk

I guess. I never heard it called that before. I always called it "driver stopped responding or driver reset

I haven't had any issues with my card or the older beta. I'm staying with the older beta for now

thanks dude

This problem's been around many years though especially on some of the older models. It's surprising that they only fix it now.

I agree though, 290.53b works well enough and is very much stable so I'll give this one a miss as well.