Got them right from NVidia's website:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvista-64bit-285.62-whql-driver.html

Did one more test as well, definitely looks like something is wrong with 285.* drivers and Vegas 11:

Source: 1920x1080 24mbps avc, 1:17 video length
Dest: 720x480 avc, 1.75mbps

70 seconds, Vegas 10
77 seconds, Vegas 11, nvidia 285.62
30 seconds, Vegas 11, nvidia 275.33

You’re right, It’s there. Strange it did not tell me. Maybe it is because mine is a Beta version and this is probably the same driver made official. At any rate, I’m downloading it now, I have to go see a doctor today but will install it when I come back to see if I can detect any difference.

Guys, guys, guys :)

To make an over 100% * performance difference, a driver would need to be total crap. Something else is going on here.

I have just finished comparing the 285.62 vs. the 275.33; no measurable difference.

Piotr

* Or 50%, depending on how you define it :)

It can happen. Most $$ is made on those cards for games, CUDA stuff is a distant 3rd.

As an Nvidia user I'd suggest you use a non-Nvidia idea that lots of other non-Nvidia users go by:
IF IT AIN'T BROKE DON'T FIX IT!

Why did you update the drivers? Did you read the release notes to see if anything is improved that you would use?

Hah! I just got it from the nVidivious message from the nVidocramancer . . . I was about to d/l and decided to come 'ere first . .



If it ain't etc etc . . . . moving on . ..

Grazie

Would anyone else like to test this? I just downloaded the older version but i am away from my main workstation for a few days so can't test it here. There should not be any change in speed, but i guess its possible.

Paul.

To TheHappyFriar, there's 3 reasons why I updated the drivers.

1) I use two machines for rendering because my business requires substantial amounts of video rendering every day. One is my office machine which is still on 275.33. The other pc is hooked to the home theater tv downstairs, it does rendering for me but also plays blurays, video games, etc, so it needs the latest driver. It also servers as the occaisional test mule as in this case.

2) I'm having one issue which may be Vegas related or driver related. I have a script that will locate all Vegas projects in a directory, render each region in each file to a specificly named folders for that project, two subdirectories in that folder with two versions of all the videos in each holder, one high bitrate the other low bitrate. The problem I'm having is that sometimes the Vegas 11 encoder will simply stop and I can't figure out why. This only happens when the render template changes. So if there are 15 regions in a project then 30 videos get created, and I render high quality version, low qualtiy version for each one, rinse and repeat. I changed my script to render all high quality encodes first and then do the low quality ones, but Vegas 11 would still sometimes stop working when it had to change the render template. So I was hoping the new NVidia drivers maybe would resolve that, although it may be a Vegas 11 problem.

3) 275.33 only uses ~65% of my gpu during encoding, so I was curious if the new ones would use the gpu better. They do on paper, it seemed to go up to ~80% gpu use during encoding except that it all actually runs much slower for whatever reason.

Has anyone else been able to re-create what I'm seeing? I actually did briefly try 285.62 on the office machine but it exhibited the identical slowness behavior so I reverted that one back and now it's ok again, but the downstairs machine is still on 285.62 for now. Both machines are largely identical, Win7 64bit, 16gb ram, i7-2600k both running at 4.3ghz. Small differences are office machine is P8P67 motherboard, other machine is P8P67 Pro. Also office machine video card is EVGA 580GTX SC, other machine is Galaxy 580GTX stock.

Unless the release notes say it "fixes" your problem, odds are it doesn't.

For your #2 reason, disable GPU rendering. If it works in software then it's something with the GPU: DX, drivers, hardware issue, etc.

As for #1, my old ATI 3850 is bluray compatible. That's something that's been in the drivers for years. Same with the games. UNLESS there is a fix for something in that driver, DON'T update. It's not like a windows update where they patch something, GPU drivers aren't tested except to fix things they say were broken. They could easily make things worse.

Just go back to the only one & don't update until the release notes says "Vegas rendering speed improved" or something simular.

EDIT: video drivers are one of those things where if something messes up you could need to reinstall the OS. Double check the driver install procedures for Nvidia cards. ATI used to require you uninstall the old drivers, a few years ago they changed that. Some times it's also a good idea to reinstall DX, but since you're not using XP that may not be required. With 2K it was always recommended & since DX9 was the last one for XP I never bothered because every app installs it anyway.

I updated to the 285.38 from 275.33. Magic Bullet Looks kept crashing in VP11 64 and Red Giant support suggest I update to 285.38 which was Beta at the time. It fixed the problem with MBL. I didn't compare before/after performance in rendering or preview. However I'm getting about 4 times increased performance in both compared to VP 10.

@TheHappyFriar
I know I can disable gpu rendering...but then I don't have enough rendering power on cpu alone. I used to have three overclocked i7 machines in my render farm encoding 24/7 to handle my render needs and even that wasn't enough, I was falling behind. Two machines gpu assisted though with Vegas 11 keeps pace, so gpu support is imperative for my business. No big deal, I changed my script, I have 'high' and 'low' version of the script, I just run one, then the other when it completes and the job is done. I'm hoping one machine will handle all tasks when the NVidia 6 series cards come out. For new games you always want to have the latest drivers, trust me I was a video game graphics programmer for over 14 years :)

I'll revist my 285 drivers issue I guess, seems like I'm the only one having the issue, so maybe it's something special on my two machine which is causing it. Very odd :(

@ Pete: I have just tried both drivers (275 and 285) on an 8 core machine (2 x Xeon quads) with Windows 7 + Geforce GTS 450 and found no difference in rendering speed (rendering from AVCHD to Mpeg2 full HD at 30 Mbps).
With both drivers my CPU usage is 75-80% and GPU usage is 40-50%.

Clearly neither the CPUs nor the graphics card is the bottleneck on this machine.

Actually rendering on this machine is noticeable faster with GPU assist OFF - but previewing is slightly faster.

A suite in the french Le Repaire Vegas site :
Looks a little, little faster by 5 seconds in the SCS Vegas test.
285.62 driver in 1'09" vs 280.26 driver in 1'14".

http://www.repaire.net/forums/sony-vegas/238755-pilote-de-carte-graphique-nvidia.html#post1970051306

seems like I'm the only one having the issue

Well, no. I am not sure about having exactly the same issue, but after installing the new driver, I was unable to watch TV on my computer: I could hear the sound but my monitor was black. And I was having problems with Vegas.

I was not sure it was caused by the driver update because I also did a Windows update, plus installed some other software on the same day. So I did a system restore and everything was working again. I then re-installed the other software and re-did the Windows update, but I did not re-update the NVIDIA driver. Everything is working again.

So, yes, I would say the latest NVIDIA driver was the cause of the problems I was experiencing.

I can add to this that after installing 285.62 I had the same problem playing HDV m2t files: I could only hear the sound, the thumbnails in windows explorer were fine but the monitor stayed black. The solution was to install 280.26 (downloaded from the nvidia-website).

After installing 285.62 ...

When playing an avi or m4v file in Windows (7) Media Player, response time using the seek function (forward and backward) goes from almost instantaneous to 2+ seconds.

A rollback fixes the problem.

Definitely the driver!

Mark