nVidia 196.21 Driver Test

Introduction

Today I’ll be testing nVidia’s latest official driver (196.21), and I’ll compare it to my previously installed driver (195.62). The games used will be run at the settings I usually play them at. TrAA will be used where possible with SS denoting super-sampling and MS denoting multi-sampling.

As usual, the text charts are color coded and yellow means 195.62 is faster, while red means 196.21 is faster.

Hardware

• nVidia GeForce GTX285 (1 GB, reference clocks).
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (reference 3 GHz clock).
• 4 GB DDR2-800 RAM (4×1 GB, dual-channel).
• Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R (Intel G33 chipset, F7 BIOS).
• Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic.
• 30” HP LP3065 (maximum resolution 2560×1600).

Software

• Windows XP 32 bit SP3
• nVidia driver 196.21 and 195.62, high quality filtering, all optimizations off, LOD clamp enabled.
• DirectX February 2010.
• All games patched to their latest versions.

Settings

• 16xAF forced in the driver, vsync forced off in the driver.
• AA forced either through the driver or enabled in-game, whichever works better.
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• All results show an average framerate.