Dark Clan Forum

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 (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/GeForce-Catalyst-overclocking,2037.html)

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

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.

(http://i43.tinypic.com/v627w3.png)