nVidia 197.13 Driver Mega Test
Today I’ll be testing nVidia’s latest official driver (197.13), and I’ll compare it to my previously installed driver (196.21).
Initially I was planning to put up the usual small selection of games I use for regular driver tests, but I started seeing some very surprising results. So I decided to re-benchmark all of the results covered in my i5 750 performance test, using the exact same settings. Keep reading to discover the findings I made in the 17 tested games.
TrAA will be used where possible, with SS denoting super-sampling, and MS denoting multi-sampling.
Hardware
- Intel Core i5 750 (2.8 GHz, 21x multiplier, Turbo Boost on).
- 4 GB DDR3-1333 RAM (2×2 GB, dual-channel).
- Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3 (Intel P55 chipset, F6 BIOS).
- nVidia GeForce GTX285 (1 GB, reference clocks).
- Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic.
- 30” HP LP3065.
Software
- Windows XP 32 bit SP3
- nVidia driver 197.13 and 196.21, high quality filtering, all optimizations off, LOD clamp enabled.
- DirectX February 2010.
- 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.
- Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
- All results show an average framerate.
Thx for another great driver review
I always wait with installing a new driver until you release your review of it ^^ Keep it up!
Great Article
We also depend on these driver reviews!
This is a great article BFG! This is a remarkable driver from Nvidia also. You are correct in saying that not often do we get such a strong performance increase from a driver update.
I’m glad someone actually reads these things.