GeForce 295.73 WHQL Driver Performance Analysis
As part of an ongoing feature for AlienBabelTech, this editor is comparing the performance of 21 modern benchmarks with the current GeForce 295.73 driver, with the previous 285.62 WHQL driver from last October. The emphasis is on comparing driver changes on performance in DX10 and DX11 games. Due to site issues, including with publishing, this evaluation is quite late although the performance analysis charts were published on ABT Forum in a timely fashion
This driver performance evaluation will give us a natural comparison of the driver performance improvements for the GTX 500 series including multi-GPU over the last driver set. Representing the Nvidia cards, we will test the GTX 580 and the GTX 590 so as to give us a sampling of the highest performing cards.
We are testing with the GTX 590 which uses two down-clocked GTX 580 cores in SLI. The percentage of change from upgrading the drivers should remain about the same for any capable CPU platform.In addition, we will also test using a lower-end GTX 550 Ti with less demanding resolutions and settings. The settings are marked on the charts and ‘ultra’ or the highest setting is always picked when there is a choice, except as noted. We use the same settings as for the previous 285.62 WHQL driver performance evaluation and they are noted on the charts.
We are going to test GeForce 295.73 versus the last GeForce 285.62 driver using our current benchmark suite of 22 modern PC games plus three synthetic benchmarks, Heaven 2.5, 3DMark11 and Vantage. We have added Batmman: Arkham City to our results. Our Core i7-920 has been overclocked further to 4.2GHz as part of our benching platform beginning with this evaluation.
Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit using Intel Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz, 6 GB DD3, and our Nvidia video cards are a GTX 580, GTX 590 and GTX 550 Ti. All of the games are tested at two of these three resolutions: 2560×1600, 1920×1080, 1680×1050; with 16xAF, and we use DX11/10/10.1 whenever possible.
Let’s get right to the test configuration, the driver’s release notes and the tests.
Hey, thanks for another nice Drivers-review!
Btw, what happend to CrossFire vs. SLI – Part III? Is that still in the works? I’ve been longing to see some nice micro-stuttering tests and some CPU-bottleneck investigations!
I just love things that programmers don’t do the minimum of checking on;