Driver update: GeForce 314.14 Beta Drivers (for nVidia GeForce GTX 680, inside and outside of SLI configurations)

GeForce has released a new set of beta drivers for a specific graphics card, the GTX 680, and this update offers significant performance benefits. Read on, then download the GeForce 314.14 beta drivers.

Be sure to click “Install GeForce Graphics Drivers” in Setup.

Just The Stats

For single-card configurations, Sniper Elite V2 has seen a major 23% increase in overall performance and Sleeping Dogs has seen a smaller, but still significant improvement by 9%.

For SLI configurations, Sniper Elite V2 sees a 22% increase, Sleeping Dogs gets a more significant 14% increase and StarCraft II sees a 9% increase. Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Just Cause 2 all receive 5% performance enhancements, while Skyrim and Batman: Arkham City each receive a slightly smaller 4% increase. Battlefield 3’s performance went up 4%, and the Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena went up 3.7%. In addition, Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army and Resident Evil 6 both received updated SLI profiles.

What are Drivers?

The GTX 680 is a high-end graphics card, and graphics cards are used for everything displayed on your screen. For people looking for smooth gaming performance and high-quality content playback, the latest graphics cards and drivers are a must.

The GTX 680, nVidia’s flagship single-GPU card of their 600 series.

Drivers are a set of instructions used to relay information between the parts of your computer. Driver updates are important, because they usually help increase performance, add new features, and get rid of problems that may have arisen with the previous versions. Beta drivers aren’t as secure, but for gamers, the latest driver is worth taking the risk if it means significant performance boosts in their favorite games, and the 314.14 update for the GTX 680 is no exception.

Geek Terms

Framerate, or frames per second, is the amount of images displayed on screen within a second. Higher framerates in video games means smoother performance and more time to react, which is important in competitive settings.

SLI, or Scalable Link Interface, is a process used on compatible motherboards between compatible graphics cards to get them to work in tandem. In a perfect world, two cards in SLI will double performance — while, unfortunately, this usually isn’t the case, the performance increases are significant and can be enhanced with driver updates such as this one. Optimization for SLI is bad in some cases, but more and more games and drivers are being made with these compatibility issues in mind.

Anti-aliasing is the act of removing jagged lines from an image. Higher AA settings means a clearer, less pixelated look from the surroundings.

Resolutions, such as 1080p (popularly called HD), simply determine the amount of pixels making up an image. More pixels = more details.

To simplify the process of updating drivers on your machine, download our Driver Reviver software. We don’t support beta drivers — like the one in this article — but we do update our users to the latest stable releases.