well concerning games and accourding to a lot of people, 81.95 boosts performance in "world of warcraft", but lately I've been playing "star wars: knights of the old republic 2" and this game will not run on 81.95 with dual core systems. Apparently, nvidia introduced multithreading optimizations that broke this game on systems like that, so I had to go back to 78.01. The game developers are supposed to patch that, but you know how slow they are when you're not paying a monthly subscription. I guess it depends on what you're playing, but I heard that there's a noticeable difference in performance in a lot of games (especially with the nvidia 5 series ). Some people reported no difference though (mostly 6 series).