NVIDIA has released its 182.50 drivers today for the usual GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, and 200-series desktop GPUs, supporting multiple languages.

New in this version is optimization for single GPU and SLI support for upcoming games, and a long list of bug fixes for various cards (69 pages of release notes -- this appears to be an especially large update).

The 182 drivers provide the typical set of performance upgrades, this time citing titles such as Fallout 3, F.E.A.R. 2, GRiD, Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and more. Full OpenGL 3.0 support is also included.

One of the features added not mentioned in the release notes is Ambient Occlusion, a feature which makes lighting more realistic, revealing soft shadows and finer detail not previously shown. Though this is enabled by default in many newer games, the option in these new drivers means older games will look nicer than ever. NVIDIA's senior product manager Jason Paul explains:

"If you look at the room that you’re sitting in, and you look up in the corner of the room, you may notice that the light is slightly less intense than it is along other portions of the wall. One of the physical properties of light is that when there are objects that are blocking or occluding nearby objects, even if it’s not casting a direct shadow, it blocks out some of the global or ambient light in the environment.”

Here are a couple of screenshots from Mirror's Edge showing the feature disabled (left) and enabled (right):

The downside is your framerates will take a hit of 20-40 percent, according to Paul, but if your card is decent enough, you'll have plenty to spare for a still seamless experience.

Company of Heroes, World in Conflict, Half-Life 2, World of Warcraft, and Mirror's Edge are some of the games which can take advantage of this new option.