Looking At the ForceWare Release 90 Beta Drivers

Control Panel cont.

Next up we have the SLI page for those lucky enough to have two video cards. This page is quite familiar also. The two options are quite obvious “Do not use” or “Use” SLI. A great feature of the new control panel is that simply hovering the mouse over each setting instantly brings up a description at the bottom of the screen telling you what’s going to happen. You might notice that Option 2 is greyed out. As this is still a BETA driver it required another reboot before we were presented with an option of what monitor to select. Also, currently there is a bug that forces you to reboot when enabling SLI, NVIDIA is well aware of the issue and promises us that it will be resolved in a future release.

Ah, yes. A nice graph and finally a way to easily monitor and log the temperature of the video card while gaming. Since GPU’s quickly unload the games and move back to the desktop they drop temperature very quickly and it’s difficult without 3rd party software to find out exactly how hot your card was getting. NVIDIA has given users the ability to display 1 hour of temperature history.

Adding the Forceware Coolbits registry key opens up the overclocking controls just as in drivers of the past. Find Optimal now shows in real time what clock settings are being tested and is entertaining to watch it go soaring. We did experience something strange with Find Optimal where it would only complete one pass of the progress bar and stop, each time at 495/750. This was on our 7900GT known to be good for 563/780. We were able to manually set the video card higher and test it fine but this may be a feature built into the control panel or a bug that needs to be sorted out.

Display

The other features of the Display section are exactly as they sound. Here are a few screen shots of the way things are set up.

It’s nice having all of the Display options together rather than spread throughout the control panel as it’s really easy to get up and running quickly. We did uncover another bug where if you are running a pair of monitors, each on it’s own video card, that it requires a second reboot after driver installation to gain functionality of the second video card and monitor. This was not an issue in the 84.43 drivers.