GeForce 275.33 Performance analysis

As part of an ongoing feature for AlienBabelTech, this editor is comparing the performance of 33 benchmarks with the current Geforce 275.33 driver which was released last week with the 270.61 WHQL driver from last month.

This driver performance evaluation will give us a natural comparison of the driver performance improvements for the GTX 500 series including SLI 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 including multi-GPU.

We are using our overclocked Core i7-920 at 3.8 GHz and we use the same settings that we used for our Introducing the New Phenom II 980 BE vs. Core i7-920 article. This time we are testing with the GTX 590 which uses two downclocked GTX 580 cores in SLI. The percentage of change from upgrading the drivers should remain about the same for any capable CPU platform.

Nvidia is quite proud of these drivers as they bring a lot of new features to GeForce drivers including automatic updates. In fact, Nvidia released an introduction to the then beta 270.25 drivers (over v266.58) a couple of weeks ago where they tout some pretty impressive improvements from many of the same games that we are going to test for you now – in fact, all of their games are on our list, except that we are benching Left 4 Dead (1) instead of Left for Dead 2.:

We are going to test GeForce 275.33 using our current benchmark suite of 30 games plus three synthetic benchmarks, Heaven 2.5, 3DMark11 and Vantage.  Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit using Intel Core i7-920 at 3.80 GHz, 6 GB DD3, and our Nvidia video cards are a GTX 580 and a GTX 590.  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.