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- Date:
- Wednesday, June 16, 2010
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
NVIDIA ForceWare 257.21 Driver Performance
NVIDIA’s new ForceWare 257.21 WHQL driver takes a giant leap in version numbers, but does it take a giant leap in real-world gaming performance? We found at least one scenario where it does! You surely don’t want to miss the giant leap in Transparency Antialiasing performance experienced in Battlefield: Bad Company 2.
Just Cause 2 - Gameplay
We are breaking up the Just Cause 2 graphs into two parts. Firstly, we are going to show you playing the game with FRAPs, then we are going to show you the built in Benchmark "Concrete Jungle." Why you ask? Because NVIDIA specifically states that the performance difference of 25% is seen in this benchmark. So we need to see if it translates to real-world gameplay.
Playing the game, we do find a slight consistent performance improvement, but again, like a couple of other games, It is hard to actually notice that difference in-game.
Just Cause 2 - "Concrete Jungle" Benchmark
Now we are going to "FRAPS" the built in benchmark.
Well, here we are seeing a higher degree of performance improvements, almost 14% in fact. It is still way shy of NVIDIA’s 25% claim. However, like Metro 2033 we are running the game at actual real-world playable in-game settings with this video card with 4X AA at 2560x1600 and highest in-game settings. It may in fact show a greater difference without AA or lowering quality settings, but in reality no one is going to play with lesser image quality when they can crank up those settings on this video card.
You'll also notice that the "Benchmark" performance is a lot lower than the actual in-game performance. This is also another reason why we don’t put faith in "benchmarks" but rather real-world gameplay; yet again the benchmark performance doesn't match up with the actual real-world gameplay performance.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - 8X CSAA
We saved the best for last, again, this is in two parts, the first one showing a regular 8X CSAA setting at 2560x1600 and the second one showing Alpha Transparency Antialiasing performance comparison.
At 2560x1600 with 8X CSAA and no transparency AA, we are actually seeing a nice performance improvement with the new driver. This is very interesting because this game is not listed on NVIDIA’s game list for improvements, yet here it is, a 10% improvement in performance. This seems to be very consistent throughout the level looking at the map. Now let’s see what happens when we compare Transparency AA below.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - 4X AA Plus 4X TR SSAA
In the graph below, we are jumping down to 1920x1200 so that we can run Transparency AA. We are running with in-game 4X AA selected, so 4X MSAA on polygon edges. We have manually forced 4X SuperSample AA on in the driver control panel so that 4X TR SSAA will be enabled in-game on all alpha/transparency textures like vegetation.
This graph really speaks for itself, there is a MASSIVE improvement in performance with the new driver with Transparency AA enabled in this game. Yes, that is no less than an 86% performance improvement! Surely you say this must be an error. Well, I tried my best to debunk it, but so far it seems to be true. I have reinstalled a clean OS so that it had only been touched by the driver being tested. Then I re-ran this test a few times with each driver version and verified the numbers to be correct for both. To make sure that 4X TR SSAA was working on both driver versions I have delved into screenshots zooming in at 300% to look at the pixels and edges of alpha textures. To that, I do have a comparison to show you below.
In this screenshot I have zoomed in on the image at 300% so you can take a closer look at the vegetation. Look closely at the big leaf to the right of each cropped screenshot; you can quite clearly see antialiasing is enabled on the edges of the leaf. You will also notice it present on all shadow edges between both screenshots as well. We looked very closely at this entire frame and found the images to look identical. It seems 4X TR SSAA really is working quite well with the new driver in this game. In this frame, where we took these screenshots, the one on the 197.75 driver was at 23 FPS and the one with the 257.21 driver was 34 FPS.
The Bottom Line
ForceWare 257.21 WHQL generally lives up to its name so far. We are seeing performance improvements in some games, and not so much in others, which is typical. Overall though, it seems that even in games that aren’t on the list may indeed benefit with these drivers. We were certainly impressed with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and its transparency AA improvements. This is going to change what we find playable in this game now with GTX 400 series video cards as Transparency AA performs much better now. There may also be other games where Transparency AA is improved, and as such, we will continue to test with this image quality feature and enabled it when it improves image quality without harming gameplay performance.
It is really nice to see these free performance improvements. The GTX 400 series greatly needs it, and NVIDIA has shown they are not resting on current performance but are rather trying to improve that; which we greatly appreciate. Competition is good, and lately we have seen great strides from AMD as well, improving performance with its drivers. This constant back and forth serving up free performance improvements is great for us gamers and consumers of these video cards. If you are using the GTX 470 or GTX 480, grab this driver to get the best experience possible. We encountered no problems in the games tested so far with this new driver. We’ll start using this new driver on all evaluations starting from this date forward to compare with AMD cards.