GeForce 280.26 Performance analysis

As part of an ongoing feature for AlienBabelTech, this editor is comparing the performance of 24 modern benchmarks with the current GeForce 280.26 driver which was released last week with the previous 275.33 WHQL driver from June.  The emphasis is on comparing driver changes on performance in DX10 and DX11 games.

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.  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 are using our overclocked Core i7-920 at 3.8 GHz and we use similar settings for our high end cards that we used for our Introducing the New Phenom II 980 BE vs. Core i7-920 article.  Any changes are noted on the chart.   The GTX 550 Ti settings mostly correspond to last week’s article, The Passive Gigabyte & Overclocked HIS HD 6770 meet the EVGA GTX 550 Ti.

This time 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.

We are going to test GeForce 280.26 versus the last GeForce 275.33 driver using our current benchmark suite of 20 modern PC 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.