Conclusion

Usually NVIDIA is known to provide stable drivers right from the beginning, which means that you don't see huge jumps in performance or power consumption when you install a new version. As we expected the performance offered by the latest WHQL driver 310.90 wasn't a surprise.

In fact there is only one benchmarks and three games where we've seen noticeable differences over the previous WHQL driver 310.70. The games we're talking about are Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, Dragon Age 2, StarCraft 2. Concerning Call of Duty the latest NVIDIA driver is 3.5 percent faster. In case of StarCraft 2 the performance improvement is about 6 %. As for Dragon Age we measured a performance loss of 3 %. Less interesting for gamers but very interesting for overclockers is the 2.5 % performance gain in 3DMark 11 over the latest WHQL driver we've tested which result in a score 250 points higher.

Looking at the power consumption values we also see a small gain. In idle this driver seems to be more energy efficient by 2 Watts.

So basically switching to the latest WHQL driver from NVIDIA changes almost nothing when it comes to "old" games. Performance is almost identical, which is clearly visible when you look at our performance ratings.