Conclusion
It's very boring to test nVidia drivers I tell you. AMD drivers are more
fun to test as you don't know what the result will be and have a lot of
surprise. Here you get almost the same value at the end of the benchmark...
Anyway since the GTX 680 has been released one can see from the "Performance
Index" that two drivers out of 13 did bring a performance boost.
From the 300.99 Beta to the 301.42 WHQL performance is the same. After that
there is an increase when you install 304.48 Beta. On average performance goes
up by 2 percent (up to 5 percent under certain games). Then nothing happens
until you install the latest drivers (310.33 Beta). There you can see an average
increse in performance on NVIDIA's Kepler architecture by 3 percent.
nVidia drivers are very constant, the GTX 680 is only 5 % faster with latest
drivers than it was with the first drivers that actually supported this card. Almost perfect drivers
from the beginning? I mean with AMD from the first supported ones to the latest
ones you have a 40 % difference on average.
Now if we take a closer look at the results we got here: upgrading from the
306.97 WHQL to the 310.33 Beta will boost the following games:
- Batman: Arkham City (5 %)
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (8.7 %)
- Dragon Age II (5.7 %)
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (6.3 %)
- StarCraft II (6.3 %).
Job well done nVidia!
Author: Christian Ney
c.ney@ocaholic.ch
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