Arriving just a few weeks after the release of their 337.88 GeForce WHQL driver, NVIDIA’s driver team is back again with a new beta driver. Now at version 340.43 beta, with this latest driver NVIDIA is once again switching driver branches with the launch of their new R340 branch.

Briefly, from a functionality standpoint R340 will be a relatively straightforward driver branch. As the follow-up to R337’s significant DirectX overhaul R340 is far more low-key release that is focused on iteration and minor features, as reflected by NVIDIA’s release highlights and release notes.

To that end there is a single new feature that has been added with R340: x86 Miracast support. NVIDIA has supported Miracast for a couple of years now on Tegra 3 and later SoCs, however Miracast functionality has not been available on the company’s discrete GPU products until now. Beginning with R340 Miracast is available on GeForce products running under Windows 8.1, with NVIDIA presumably tying together their recently-developed GameStream video encoding functionality with Windows 8.1’s built-in Miracast support.

Otherwise for gaming this is a bugfix and profile update release. NVIDIA is classifying this as their Game Ready driver for GRID: Autosport and the Battlefield: Hardline beta, while a few other games including The Elder Scrolls: Online and Watch Dogs have received either new or updated SLI profiles.

Finally, while it doesn’t impact this version in particular, it’s worth reminding everyone that R340 will be the last driver branch to support NVIDIA’s Direct3D 10 generation GPUs (8/9/100/200/300 series). Starting with R343 later this year, support for those GPUs will be dropped as those products are moved to legacy status, only receiving further R340 bugfix drivers on an as-needed basis until April 1st, 2016.

As usual, you can grab the drivers for all current desktop and mobile NVIDIA GPUs over at NVIDIA’s driver download page.

Source: NVIDIA (via SH SOTN)

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  • skeezix99 - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link

    3DMark Skydiver demo now presents a black screen once the skydiver lands. This is new, the demo itself worked fine in the previous driver (but the GFX tests presented black screens).
  • FuzzDad - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link

    Something isn't right w/these w/respect to TF2...here are a series of timedemo's I've run against the last three drivers (w/same video setup):

    335.23 Driver 2639 frames 23.324 seconds 113.15 fps ( 8.84 ms/f) 8.699 fps variability
    337.88 Driver2639 frames 21.212 seconds 124.41 fps ( 8.04 ms/f) 5.136 fps variability
    340.43 Driver 2639 frames 23.111 seconds 114.19 fps ( 8.76 ms/f) 7.220 fps variability
  • leliel - Tuesday, June 17, 2014 - link

    Would be nice if they finally fixed the TDRs on the 560M I'm still using, but I guess I'm not holding my breath that that will ever happen at this point :l
  • TheJian - Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - link

    Bummer, miracast tied to win8. I have no plans to EVER use that OS. Should have tied it to win7 at least. Hope a fix is coming as there are too few people using win8 for this to be worth the waste of time on R&D. I hope MS paid for this crap. It's a real pity AMD/NV have to waste a single dime on optimizing for Win8/8.1.

    Queue win8 lovers hate posts...LOL.
  • killeak - Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - link

    Miracast is a feature added to Windows 8.1, is not supported by the OS itself in any other Windows version including 8.0. As far I as know both Intel and AMD had support for it since 8.1 was launched. So nVidia was the only gpu vendor without support for miracast under w8.1, they are just catching up...

    While I guess they can add miracast to other OS too just like Intel had WiDi before w8.1, but they also want to sell shields and streaming to the TV was a shield feature, that's why I think they delay the implementation of this feature under w8.1. But I guess they realize that shield is not selling well, and they were the only ones without the feature, so they gave up and just catching up with the competition...
  • jardows2 - Wednesday, June 18, 2014 - link

    If only to respond to your unnecessary Windows 8 hate post.

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