nVidia Big Bang Driver (GeForce 180.48)
Direct3D (Current)
In Bioshock (one of nVidia’s listed titles) the Big Bang driver delivers a nice 9.03% performance gain with 4xAA and a smaller performance gain when using 8xAA. I use 4xAA when I play Bioshock so that performance gain will be handy when I next replay the game. Call of Juarez also sees a small performance gain which again is handy, given it’s a very demanding title. The rest of the tests have basically no change aside from Stalker, which sees a small performance drop.
It’s also worth noting that when I was playing through Call of Duty 4 with this driver, I noticed large triangle artifacts in the sky in one spot in the “All Ghillied Up” level, near the church tower where you snipe the sniper. I tried to take a screenshot the next day but I couldn’t replicate the problem, so it was probably random occurrence rather than a consistent driver glitch.
IMO, most of the results you found can be discarded as statiscally insignificant. Nvidia’s claims hold some truth, but only under very specific settings and/or resolutions. They brought more then just FPS gains though
True, but to be fair I only tested one game on nVidia’s list (Bioshock), and I observed a good performance gain there with 4xAA.
If you play the games on nVidia’s list, I have no doubt you could see some good performance gains.