GeForce 320.00 Beta Performance Analysis – Part 1 – GTX 680 and Titan

As part of a regular feature for AlienBabelTech, this editor is comparing the performance of 31 benchmarks with the just released GeForce Beta 320.00 driver release versus the last GeForce 314.22 WHQL divers.  We are going to give you GTX 680 and GeForce Titan results in this Part 1 today, and GTX 690 and GTX 680 SLI performance results in Part 2, tomorrow.

This driver performance evaluation will give a natural comparison between the performance improvements since Nvidia’s last driver set when the Titan was released, and in Part 2, we can again compare Titan with the GTX 690 at the highest settings at 1920×1080 and at 2560×1600.

We are going to test GeForce 320.00 using our current benchmark suite of 26 games plus 5 synthetic benchmarks, Heaven 4.0, Valley 1.0, FireStrike, 3DMark 11 and Vantage. Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit, using Intel Core i7-3770K at 4.50GHz, EVGA Z77FTW motherboard and 16GB of Kingston “Beast” HyperX RAM at 2133MHz, and the settings and hardware are identical except for the drivers being tested.

The GeForce Titan and the GTX 680 are tested 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.

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