GeForce WHQL 331.58 Performance Analysis

Should you upgrade for potentially significant improvements over the last WHQL GeForce drivers? Nvidia suggests that the performance improvements for some games may be significant for the latest games and especially for 4K resolution, using the latest game-ready drivers released this morning.  ABT was able to get a preview of these drivers, and as part of a regular feature for AlienBabelTech, this evaluation is comparing the performance of 34 benchmarks with the GeForce WHQL 331.58 driver release versus the last GeForce WHQL 327.34 drivers. We are going to give you GTX 780 and GTX 770 results at 1920×1080 and at 2560×1600. As a bonus, we will also compare with the VisionTek HD 7970 at reference speeds using the latest WHQL Catalyst 13.9.This driver performance evaluation will give a natural comparison between the performance improvements since Nvidia’s last driver set when we tested the GeForce 327 family of divers. Later this week, when we evaluate our VisionTek R9 280X, we can again compare the Radeon HD 7970 and HD 7970 at GHz Edition speeds to see how the performance has improved with the latest beta drivers over the WHQL 13.9 Catalyst drivers.

We are going to test GeForce 331.58 using our current benchmark suite of 30 games plus 4 synthetic benchmarks. Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit, using an Intel Core i7-3770K at 4.50GHz, EVGA’s Z77FTW motherboard, and 16GB of Kingston “Beast” HyperX RAM at 2133MHz. The settings and hardware are identical except for the drivers being tested as we use two identical 500GB Seagate HDDs and two 240GB Kingston HyperX SSDs – one of each for Nvidia and one of each for AMD.

At GTX 760 and above, we test at higher settings and resolutions generally than we test midrange cards. All of our games are now tested at two resolutions: 2560×1600 and 1920×1080 at 60Hz, and we use DX11/10/10.1 whenever possible with a very strong emphasis on the latest DX11 games including Crysis 3 and our newest three benches, Metro: Last Light, GRID 2 and Splinter Cell: BlackList

Let’s get right to the test configuration, the driver release notes, and then the results.