As part of a regular feature for BabelTechReviews, this evaluation is comparing the performance of 31 game benchmarks with the GeForce WHQL 350.12 driver that was released the day before GTA V, versus the last GeForce WHQL 347.52 for the GTX 980 and the 347.88 launch drivers that we tested for the GTX TITAN X.
We are also going to briefly look at GTA V, BTR’s latest benchmark (number 31) which we are testing slightly differently from our original performance/IQ analysis.
This driver performance analysis features Nvidia’s top two Maxwell cards although we plan to regularly test Kepler also in upcoming evaluations. We want to at least document the performance changes of this driver set even though we are only testing two video cards. We are going to give you the performance results of the GTX 980 and the TITAN X at 1920×1080, 2560×1600, and at 3840×2160. This driver mini performance evaluation will give a natural comparison between the performance improvements since Nvidia’s last WHQL driver set and also of an intermediate TITAN X launch driver.
We are going to test GeForce WHQL 350.12 using our current benchmark suite of 31 games plus 2 synthetic benchmarks. Our testing platform is Windows 8.1 64-bit, using an Intel Core i7-4790K at 4.00GHz which turbso to 4.4GHz for all cores, an ASUS Z97E motherboard, and 16GB of Kingston “Beast” HyperX RAM at 2133MHz. The settings and hardware are identical except for the drivers being tested.
At GTX 760 and above, we test at higher settings and resolutions generally than we test midrange and lower-end cards. Although all of our games are now tested at three resolutions: 3840×2160, 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.
Several games have had updates which changed the settings. It appears that Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed: Unity, now have patched in more demanding settings and we retested it with the older drivers for a more fair comparison. We even look at GTA V with pre-release drivers as a comparison.
Let’s get right to the test configuration, the driver release notes, and then the results.
