NVIDIA GeForce 340.43 Beta Drivers Now Available
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.