"Like we had done in our AMD yearly recap, we are just
looking at the stable driver releases that occurred in 2008. While
NVIDIA maintains two legacy branches of their driver for older
generations of graphics processors, when it comes to their primary
driver there have only a handful of official releases this year.
The NVIDIA 171.05 release occurred in January, 171.06 in March,
173.08 in April, and then the 177.82 release in November. There
were multiple beta driver releases, however, filling the void
between April and November. NVIDIA most recently had introduced the
180.xx driver series, but that's still in beta. With no official
release based upon the 180 code-base out at the time of testing,
for this article we had opted to use the 180.11 beta release for a
brief look."