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Author Topic: Grafics Card Driver Performance  (Read 1237 times)
VegasKill
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« on: Fri 16.01.2009 17:50:31 »


Tom's Hardware has an interesting article about the influence of grafic card drivers on the hardware performance.
Go to the full article on Tom's Hardware.com

Here a summary of the relevant parts of the 15 pages long article:



Madness And Myth, Or Hidden Performance?

If you believe the most emphatic gamers, a graphics drivers update is good for 10 or 15 percent additional performance. How much truth is there behind the assumption that every new driver update delivers untold performance enhancements? Over the entire product life cycle of a graphics card, we might be able to expect as much as a 30 percent overall performance increase due to driver updates.

AMD brings out a new Catalyst driver every month and at Nvidia, the cycle between the official WHQL driver versions is longer. If each of these drivers were to increase 3D speed by 10 percent, the graphics cards would double their performance in a few months.

Performance Differences

Nvidia
Chip Memory GPU rate Memory rate
GeForce GTX 280 1024 MB 602 MHz 2214 MHz
GeForce 9600 GT 1024 MB 650 MHz 1800 MHz
ATI
Chip Memory GPU rate Memory rate
Radeon HD 4870 CF 512 MB 750 MHz 3600 MHz
Radeon HD 4870 512 MB 750 MHz 3600 MHz

Mess with the best, die like the rest
VegasKill
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« Reply #1 on: Fri 16.01.2009 17:51:34 »

Performance Test (part 2/2):

Orange = within measurement tolerance, green = gain of 3.1 percent or more, red = loss of more than 3 percent.

The GeForce 9600 GT gains the most from driver optimizations. The GTX 280 and CrossFire HD 4870 may lose a little performance, and the HD 4870 gains only with Crysis in High image quality mode.

The next table shows the results when CPU clock rate is increased.Core 2 Extreme X6800 @ 2.93 GHz -> 3.47 GHz

The GeForce 9600 GT benefited only slightly from the CPU clock speed increase; the GTX 280 and HD 4870 made good gains in some of the games.
The driver optimizations make a difference of just 0.7 percent to 2.9 percent in frame rates.

Overall performance fps Percent
GeForce GTX 280 (1024 MB) 177.39 3765.6 100.0
GeForce GTX 280 (1024 MB) 177.92 3832.5 +1.8
GeForce GTX 280 (1024 MB) 177.92 CPU 4090.6 +6.7
GeForce 9600 GT (1024 MB) 175.16 2451.8 100.0
GeForce 9600 GT (1024 MB) 177.92 2523.5 +2.9
GeForce 9600 GT (1024 MB) 177.92 CPU 2618.1 +3.7
Radeon HD 4870 CF (512 MB) 8.6 3482.9 100.0
Radeon HD 4870 CF (512 MB) 8.8 3515.6 +0.9
Radeon HD 4870 CF (512 MB) 8.8 CPU 3839.7 +9.2
Radeon HD 4870 (512 MB) 8.6 3355.7 100.0
Radeon HD 4870 (512 MB) 8.8 3378.3 +0.7
Radeon HD 4870 (512 MB) 8.8 CPU 3615.5 +7.0



In any case you should upgrade to Nvidia 1.8 drivers, there has been a huge performance increase:


Nightmare85 reported about a problem with the NVidia drivers 181.20 WHQL in combination with warfare: http://www.ut3darkclan.com/forum/index.php/topic,179

Mess with the best, die like the rest
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