nVidia 182.50 Driver Test
Introduction
With the release of the GTX275, nVidia has also released a new official driver, version 182.50. The release notes state “optimized single GPU and SLI support for upcoming PC games” and “numerous bug fixes”. I can only guess Chronicles of Riddick Dark Athena is possibly one such title.
So then, this article will be an exact copy of my last article except I’ll recycle the 182.08 results and compare them to the new 182.50 driver.
As usual, the charts are color coded for your convenience: green means the 182.08 driver is faster, while yellow means 182.50 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 182.08 & 182.50, 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.
