GeForce 180 Driver Brings Multi-Monitor SLI, Dedicated GPU PhysX

I posted yesterday about Mirror’s Edge becoming the first PC game to fully utilize the PhysX physics engine, but what I somehow forgot about was the new 180 driver that brings some great new functionality to the table. Two major new features include multi-monitor SLI support and the ability to dedicate a GPU for PhysX use. This is also the first driver that allows SLI support on Intel X58 motherboards.

The ability to run PhysX on a dedicated GPU has been a desire shared by many gamers ever since NVIDIA first released support for the technology to run off of the GPU. In order to take advantage, you will need to use an 8, 9 or 200-series GPU. Anything older is not supported, sadly. The cards also have to include at least 256MB of memory, but that’s a rather simple target.

For those with an ATI card as their primary, you might be able to still dedicate an NVIDIA GPU for PhysX, but only if you are using Windows XP. Because of how Vista handles display drivers, it makes it virtually impossible to accomplish, but XP is much more lenient. In addition, NVIDIA doesn’t recommend dedicating a GPU if using an SLI setup, as performance will be hit. It works, but they said improvements are definitely en route.

The new driver has also been tweaked a great deal to offer performance to a handful of games, including Assassin’s Creed, BioShock, Crysis Warhead, Far Cry 2, GRID and others. Overall, this is one of the most important driver releases from NVIDIA in a while, so if you have one of their GPUs, it’s definitely worth the time to upgrade.

Enables NVIDIA PhysX acceleration on a dedicated GeForce graphics card. Use one card for graphics and dedicate a different card for PhysX processing for game-changing physical effects. Learn more here. (Note: GPU PhysX is supported on all GeForce 8-series, 9-series and 200-series GPUs with a minimum of 256MB dedicated graphics memory. This driver package automatically installs PhysX System Software version 8.10.13).