Some new drivers from Nvidia arrived a while ago, and I downloaded them today.

Just wanted to say that they eliminated almost all FPS drop in the Thieves Guild area, which was a complete nightmare before.

A lot of that performance benefit for Skyrim indoors have been in since the 290 drivers released end of December. But yes, they greatly optimized the drivers to better handle the indoor particle/fog effects in areas like Thieves Guild/Ragged Flagon, although enabling TSAA will still make performance tank in those areas.

290 release that first introduced some of those benefits: http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvista-64bit-290.53-beta-driver.html

Apparently the 295s added another 20% or so.

yes, I remember reading about that, but I thought the 290s were only beta drivers, hence I didn't download them.

They were (and still are) betas. The 295.73 version is the latest "official" release, according to NVidia's website.

Yes, only beta GeForce drivers have been released since Skyrim came out, until now.
Therefore Skyrim has been unplayable with WHQL drivers, until now.
The new drivers are great.
Enjoy.

Yep they were Betas, but WHQL certification doesn't offer any tangible benefits while otoh, waiting for WHQL you forego the very real and tangible performance and game compatibility updates that come in each Beta.

Exactly.

the 295.73 is not beta.. it is WHQL certified..
I'm using it right now.

Yeah 295.xx drivers!!

Judging by the posts in this thread, I'm guessing I'm the only one here who gets instant crashes upon launching Skyrim with the 295.73 drivers and "display driver has stopped responding"? The beta 290.xx works just fine for me, but I wish I could have that performance boost that the new ones supposedly give. Anyway, I posted in the Nvidia forms about this early last week, along with one other person, and no one has responded there.

Indoor Fog/Particle effect and being around lots of fire seems to hit me on my setup. Anyone have any experience with halfing the particles loaded or any other .ini changes to help fix this? Small stutter sometimes indoors and I know its due to these fog/flame effects. Sigh AMD drivers :/
Any negative impact to halfing the particles from my 700 to 350?

I had trouble with 295.73 being a bit slow in Skyrim (it made other games like Rift unplayable). 295.51 works fine.

…

350 particles should be perfectly fine. You could, in fact, drop to 100 (it still looks OK) to see if there's a tangible performance benefit and then work your way upwards to a good quality/performance mix.

Here's a few mods you can try, I have not tried them myself but they were recommended for better visuals/performance by another user on 3D Vision forums:

Exterior Fog
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=9930

Interior Fog
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=9571

If that setting that halves particles actually does anything, it should help improve performance. There's also settings for each fog/particle effect system in the Creation Kit that I saw, but changing or removing all of those will take some time.

Ya saw those might give them a shot

I had to revert back to the 295.51 beta drivers today. Started getting frame rate drops in Solitude at the spawn point and walking towards the smith area. Dropped from 60 to 52 there using SLI, had been running fine but I've noticed a lot of micro-stutter lately, especially outside, was smooth as silk before. Reverted drivers and everything seems to be fine now. The IQ isn't as good though, new drivers were a lot more vibrant. For me they had an affect pretty close to what the two fog mods have. Still not seeing the nirnroot glow, thought the new drivers fixed that but apparently not. Must have been the new game I started. Up to level 26 and the nirnroots outside of Whiterun have respawned a few times and still no glow.