NVidia 196.75 Drivers Performance Boost

[Top-Tier-Tech]

Released March 2nd

• 
  
  • Up to 13% performance increase in Crysis: Warhead with a single GPU
  • Up to 30% performance increase in Crysis: Warhead with SLI technology
  • Up to 13% performance increase in H.A.W.X with single GPU
  • Up to 15% performance increase in H.A.W.X with SLI technology
  • Up to 30% performance increase in Left 4 Dead with single GPU
  • Up to 28% performance increase in Left 4 Dead with SLI technology
  
  

Also added Multi-GPU support for Napoleon: Total War and Mass Effect 2 among others.

In Crysis Warhead I'm getting a solid 60FPS at 1920x1200, 4x AA, and all settings to gamer. Before this driver I was getting 40-55FPS on the same settings.

[Jaketh]

downloading now

[mrmouth]

Some serious increases...

I wait 5 days (as I said I was going to do from now on) to DL 10.2 CCC in hopes of not running into a hotfix... and next day...10.2 hotfix

[Jaketh]

Bad Company 2 FPS increased by 15 average, badass driver

[english tyrant]

They've taken it off the site because it was overheating cards by not managing the fan speeds properly.

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=161503

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=161525

[Freddie]

You beat me to it - Driver gods Nvidia have had to pull these drivers as there frying video cards left and right - uninstall ASAP!

[Douchebag]

You beat me to it - Driver gods Nvidia have had to pull these drivers as they frying video cards left and right - uninstall ASAP!

ouch. ATI FTW

[Jaketh]

been installed for two days playing constant BC2 with no problems, im not uninstalling

[Top-Tier-Tech]

No problems for me either, My maximum GPU temp remains no higher than it was before at 78C under full load. My second card doesn't exceed 72C as it gets better airflow and always has.

Both cards idle at 42C, and yes, my fans do speed up under load just like they should, so obviously the driver doesn't disable the fan controller across the board.

In Crysis Warhead I could get the hotter GPU up to 85C but the fan automatically sped up to 65% as well (it sits at 40% normally)

[craziii]

I use rivatuner for fan speed management, so lets try that driver :p overheating is not a problem.

[mrmouth]

It looks like it is happening to an extremely small amount of people, and has to do with certain fan controllers that only 1-2 manufacturers use.

It is pretty simple, if you are getting low fps, coupled with massive heat exhaust, you should probably not run those drivers. Or you could also try and set a manual fan speed. But it is looking like you might have to run the fan at nearly 80%...

Not good publicity for a public that already wants to hang this company. But at some point, people need to be aware of what is going on inside their box. I check temps after every new driver, because this wouldn't be the first time both companies have pulled drivers due to heat issues. And all the cited forum posts pertaining to Starcraft 2, show people with their head in the clouds, continuing to play, while their gpu fried...

[english tyrant]

You would have thought they would test new drivers on a VERY wide range of cards and coolers, but obviously not.

[Top-Tier-Tech]

You would have thought they would test new drivers on a VERY wide range of cards and coolers, but obviously not.

You would think the same about those drivers that ATI released causing certain cards to display gray lines across the screen then.

[english tyrant]

You would think the same about those drivers that ATI released causing certain cards to display gray lines across the screen then.

I would, are you trying to imply something?

[Top-Tier-Tech]

I would, are you trying to imply something?

I'm implying it doesn't really matter, noone has perfect drivers that always work for everyone.

[Freddie]

You would think the same about those drivers that ATI released causing certain cards to display gray lines across the screen then.

To be fair that problem was intermittent with no obvious pattern, this problem is more specific and has more serious consequences.

[Top-Tier-Tech]

To be fair that problem was intermittent with no obvious pattern, this problem is more specific and has more serious consequences.

As BarnabyJones said, it's a problem with certain fan controllers, Nvidia doesn't test every card from every different brand out there using every different possible fan controller.

Regardless, Nvidia must be commended for such an amazing driver, NVidia cards were already the king of Crysis, but now I get 10FPS more with this driver, that's a BIG deal.

[mrmouth]

You would have thought they would test new drivers on a VERY wide range of cards and coolers, but obviously not.

It has to do with fan controllers. Entirely non-proprietary. Asus might use 2-3 different controllers during the life of any card. Someone who owns the same XFX 5850 that I do, might have a different fan controller. It is based on stock and prices. And some are better than others.

[Freddie]

edit
never mind.

[Strelok]

Cool driver bro.

The fact that ATI does not have ansitropic & trilinear filtering optimization enabled, no mipmap filtering optimizations enabled or exterimental multi-threading enabled support by default (these can be easily enabled) warrants for a couple FPS behind NVIDIA drivers which does have these optimizations enabled. NVIDIA generally enables them carefully for a minimal image quality loss, and I already have my drivers set to do the same thing (see a ATI Radeon Tweak Guide I typed up).

I'm not saying that these type of updates are only image optimizations, they simply are not, but the base ATI driver could make minor adjustments similar to what NVIDIA does for a small FPS gain with essentially almost no quality loss. Only thing ATI does is do basic Z-Buffer and color compression like any display driver does, but it also has a conservative Catalyst A.I adjustment enabled which carefully enables specific optimizations (and features like forcing AA/AF) for specific games. I wonder why ATI doesn't do this. The last time I read they seemed quite stuck on not enabling these by default.

That being said, I see these type of updates from both ATI and NVIDIA quite often with them spamming percentage numbers, sometimes, like in this case, people notice them.

P.S: In before the possibility that I might potentially get spammed by people quote mining what I am saying and claiming that I have a specific bias towards ATI and that I am bashing NVIDIA or something like that. Jakethx, my eyes are on you.