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.comHere 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 |