NVIDIA has posted fresh new beta drivers to nvidia.com this morning. The new ForceWare 190.38 drivers don't appear to have any performance improvements, but NVIDIA has made several changes to the control panel and other areas of the driver.

New in Release 190.38

Adds support for OpenGL 3.1

Adds support for CUDA 2.3 for improved performance in GPU Computing applications. See CUDA Zone for more details.

Adds a new user-controlled power management setting for GeForce 9-series and later graphics cards. This option allows users to set a performance level for each DirectX or OpenGL application.

Includes several new control panel features and numerous bug fixes. More information can be found in the release documentation.

Users without US English operating systems can select their language and download the International driver here.

The new driver also incorporates numerous bug fixes. We're more interested in the new user-controlled power management mode. It turns out to be pretty flexible. Unfortunately though, it's limited to GeForce 9 GPUs or better. From the release notes:

Power Management mode
Many NVIDIA graphics cards support multiple performance levels so that the PC can save power when full graphics performance is not required. To provide more control over these power management capabilities, NVIDIA has added the Power Management Mode control. The control consists of two settings–Adaptive and Prefer Maximum Performance.

Adaptive: This is the default setting in which the graphics card monitors GPU usage and seamlessly switches between modes based on the performance demands of the application. This allows the GPU to always use the minimum amount of power required to run a given application, and can allow even older 3D games to run in lower power modes if the game does not require full 3D performance. NVIDIA recommends this setting for best overall balance of power and performance.

Prefer Maximum Performance: This setting lets you maintain the card at its maximum performance level when 3D applications are running regardless of GPU usage. This option can be set Globally (for all 3D applications), or an application profile can be created under Program Settings to set the preference for a particular 3D application.

This feature is supported only on select GeForce 9 Series and later GPUs and applies only to DirectX and OpenGL‐based applications.

Links:
Windows XP
Windows XP x64
Windows Vista/Windows 7 32-bit
Windows Vista/Windows 7 64-bit

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