Just like an old married couple, after a rather long (four weeks) dry run we're ready for a new quickie to rekindle the love for new graphics drivers. This time, the combatants are Nvidia's last official 177 release, the GeForce 177.92 beta and the first two 178 drives made available - the official and WHQL-certified GeForce 178.13 and the dev-friendly GeForce 178.15. The test hardware remains the same as that of the previous quickie and includes a stock clocked (3.0 GHz) Core 2 Duo E8400 processor, 4GB of RAM, a MSI X48 motherboard, a stock GeForce 9800 GTX and a few SATA hard drives.
Software wise, we combined Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 32bit with the drivers mentioned above and PhysX v8.09.04 and a few test applications - Futuremark's 3Dmark Vantage, Capcom's Devil May Cry 4, Crytek's Crysis and Techland's Call of Juarez. Enough talk, let's see the results.
As you can see in the chart above, in the first test conducted, the youngest of the three competing drivers, the GeForce 178.15 managed to come out on top. The difference between it and the 177.92 and 178.13 isn't at all significant though with the biggest 'gap' being of about 50 points/marks.
The second test brings the second win for the GeForce 178.15 which reached just over 131 FPS (frames per second), some 8 and 9 FPS higher than the 177.92 and 178.13 respectively. Now, some might argue that in this case, when the results exceed 100 FPS, the 8-9 FPS difference isn't noticeable, and they would be right, but it's still noteworthy.
With Crysis the 178.15's good run ends as it performs on par with both the GeForce 177.92 and 178.13. Nothing to see here but some minuscule performance differences. Moving on…
Similar to Crysis, the Call of Juarez benchmark depicts the three drives tested as being in line with one another so whichever version you choose, Techland's first-person shooter will love or hate it equally.
From the results seen above we can conclude that the first GeForce 178 series drivers don't bring any significant performance improvements over the last GeForce 177.92. Still, the GeForce 178.15 did one-up its competitors in 3DMark Vantage and Devil May Cry 4 so there is a hint of potential but we'll probably have to wait for the next big bang (insert winking smiley here) in order to get those extra frames out of our GeForce 8, 9, GTX 200, GTS 150, GT 130, GT120 etc cards.
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Article dedicated to Sara.
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