As part of a regular feature for BabelTechReviews, this short evaluation is comparing the performance of 28 benchmarks with the GeForce WHQL 347.09 driver release versus the last GeForce WHQL 344.75 drivers released previously. We realize that we are a little late as this driver was released December 23, 2014, and there will probably be a new driver set released shortly. However, we want to at least document the performance changes of this driver set even though we are only testing one video card. We are going to give you the performance results of the GTX 980 at 1920×1080 and at 2560×1600. This driver mini performance evaluation will give a natural comparison between the performance improvements since Nvidia’s last WHQL driver set.
We are going to test GeForce 347.09 using our current benchmark suite of 28 games plus 2 synthetic benchmarks. Our testing platform is Windows 7 64-bit, using an Intel Core i7-4790K at 4.00GHz with turbo to 4.4GHz for all cores, 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 two resolutions: 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.
Let’s get right to the test configuration, the driver release notes, and then the results.
