nVidia 182.08 Driver Test
Introduction
This article tests the performance of nVidia’s latest official driver (182.08) against the previous driver I was using (181.22). This time around I’ll test the Direct3D games at the settings I play them at, demonstrating changes in real-world situations for a gamer like myself. Doing so results in more mixed settings being used because games are tuned for best playable performance, so it’s a slightly different way of approaching benchmarking to the standard fare.
For OpenGL, I’ll stick to my maximum resolution of 1920×1440 along with 8xMSAA, because I want to see if nVidia has addressed their slow 8xAA performance in OpenGL. That and 4xAA is far too easy for a GTX260+ in those games anyway.
For your convenience, the charts are color coded as usual: green means the 181.22 driver is faster, while yellow means 182.08 is faster. Also MS is transparency multi-sampling while SS is transparency super-sampling. For more information about this, please click here.
Hardware
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (reference 3 GHz clock).
- nVidia GeForce GTX260+ (896 MB, nVidia reference clocks).
- 4 GB DDR2-800 RAM (4×1 GB, dual-channel).
- Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R (Intel G33 chipset, F7 BIOS).
- Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic.
Software
- Windows XP 32 bit SP3
- nVidia Forceware 181.22 & 182.08, high quality filtering, all optimizations off, LOD clamp enabled.
- DirectX November 2008.
- 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.
- Since I’m on XP, all DX10 titles were run under DX9 render paths.
- Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
- All results show an average framerate.
