I tried out the newest 1096 driver, and I came out mostly unimpressed. There have been a few performance improvements in older DirectX games. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is now playable in hardware mode, but there's still that ugly polygon morphing hanging around. I believe I got some additional FPS in School Tycoon and X-Men Legends 2 as well. I haven't tried a lot of apps with the new driver, but so far, it looks like no bugs have been fixed. Everything that annoyed me about the 1091 driver is still present in the 1096 driver. I still can't record OpenGL apps with FRAPS, Civ 4 Colonization still has rendering corruption, and mipmapping is still screwed up, to name a few things. I have 3 suggestions for whoever's working on this driver.
1. (This is for you, Nic) Start a new thread for the 1096 driver, so those who don't know it exists will find out about it.
2. Be more detailed in the release notes. The only thing that is claimed to be fixed is screen tearing in Google Earth. I don't use Google Earth, but I've certainly seen small improvements elsewhere.
3. Actually fix bugs. It's been 2 years since Cedar Trail was released and the situation isn't any better than day one. We need DirectX 10.1 support for Flash video acceleration, we need more responsive drivers, and most importantly, we need a response from Intel.
Oh, by the way, I was invited to be a closed beta tester for an upcoming game called Quantum Rush. It runs slower than molasses climbing up a Siberian flagpole in January on the lowest possible settings. I don't know what the developers are aiming for for their bottom line as far as system requirements go, but this is ridiculous!