Nvidia beta driver is a ruin in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I had terrific Skyrim pictures everywhere. But that was at a frame rate of only 45-60fps and only one of my two SLI'd GTX480s was used. I read on these forums about the nvidia driver 285.79 which had a Skyrim profile and enabled SLI. It seemed a no-brainer to install the new driver and enable the second GPU. But disaster followed. Now none of my middle distance to far distance scenery renders at anything better than super-blurry. While my fps did improve when using both SLI cards, I now suffer in some cells from intermittent banding across the screen and an associated static buzz from the speakers.

I am staying with the beta driver but disabled one of the GTX480s. That fixed the awful blurred distant textures. Now I wait for a working driver for Skyrim that handles SLI okay.

Basically all nvidia drivers are 'beta' because they add things, fix things, and break things. The reason why they classify beta as beta is because they are not WHQL certified. WHQL certification=official. Otherwise they can't call it official so it's beta. Basically, a new beta driver is a new driver. Cool avatar. I just picked up a sealed copy of JSRF for my 360, the first and only time I've used BC.

Beta means: not yet fully tested. Nothing else. Nvidia thinks they are fine so they release them, but the full testing process has not been finished. Another reason why they do that beside giving access to bug-fixes early is that with the reports of all those people using the beta driver, the might catch potential issues that only happens with that one hardware configuration. This essential turns the beta-driver users into beta testers.

WHQL cert is a joke. Latest WHQL drivers had a bug in them that rendered playing video (or encoding it) in Media player/Movie Maker/Media Center impossible (only black screen). So MS, which does WHQL certification, did not discover that driver they certified did not work at all with MS software - one of the most widely used software ever. This bug was obviously fixed with these latest beta drivers (and indeed, they work perfectly for me). Waiting for WHQL is usually meaningless, because this certification is a joke.

After I started using the beta drivers, I got the water bug people were experiencing with SLI enabled, where the ripples seem to be animated with stop-motion. Ugly as sin and hurts frame-rate too. Didn't have that issue before updating. Other than that, the drivers were an improvement, but I have to play with a single 560Ti now to avoid the water issue. I have as well noticed HDR has become really sensitive, switching too some pretty intense levels very suddenly. In snowy scenes at night time it can literally lead to my screen shifting between dark and light palettes every few seconds when my crosshair moves from the snowy horizon to the dark sky. Really off-putting, but I'm not sure of that was an issue before the driver update or not.

I have a pair of GTX 570's using the latest Beta drivers - actually, I've not tried any other driver with Skyrim as the beta's were advertised as having the correct SLI profile. My FPS is very good indeed and I'd be surprised if the older drivers were any better. Odd the OP is having such issues. NV beta drivers are generally pretty good and address the specific issues they're released to resolve. As far as I'm aware you need SLI enabled on the 590. I have no direct firsthand experience though. Try it and see!