ever since the 300+ Nvidia drivers appeared I have had troubles with severely low fps on my card, a pre-oc'd gtx460. Before I just rolled back and stayed away from the new drivers. but then I found out I wasn't the only one, and not just with Skyrim. as it turns out, many factory overclocked cards have problems with the new drivers as well, and you have to manually set the GPU clock everytime, then games run normally.

however that doesn't seem to be the proper solution. I'm curious if others have experienced that as well; what is your card model and if you had the issue have you found another solution?

I have a GTX 460 1GB stock 675 Mhz OC'd with Afterburner to 875 Mhz. The 301.42 drivers are working beautifully. I really have noticed a increase in performance. For the first time I was able to run with the Ultra preset and it stayed between 50-60 FPS everwhere - even in cities. Also noticed FPS increases in several other games (Fable 3, Divinity 2). Here's my FPS results with FRAPS while running completely around Windhelm midday (lots of NPCs):

Min, Max, Avg
49, 63, 58.858