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 310.70 wasn't a surprise.

In fact there is only one benchmarks and two games where we've seen noticeable differences. The games we're talking about are Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3. Concerning Call of Duty the latest NVIDIA drivers are almost 3 percent faster than the 310.61 beta version. In case of Battlefield 3 the performance improvement is about 3.5 %. Less interesting for gamers but very interesting for overclockers is the 1.35 % performance gain in 3DMark 11 over the latest beta we've tested which result in a score 130 points higher.

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.