After a couple of quickies everyone would agree that we're finally ready for some harder lovin' and with Nvidia pitching in that's about to happen today. Here to help pleasure our dirty minds and dusty graphics cards are two GeForce drivers - Nvidia's last official 178 release, the GeForce 178.24 and the second official Big Bang II package coming straight from Santa Clara, the GeForce 180.43 beta. To test out the Big Shot Big Bang driver against its predecessor we're using a system equipped with 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.
The software package called to arms for the driver rumble includes Microsoft's Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 32bit, the 8.10.13 PhysX software and a few test applications - Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage, Capcom's Devil May Cry 4, Ubisoft's Far Cry 2, Crytek's Crysis Warhead, Valve's Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Epic's Unreal Tournament III, the last three being paired up with the appropriate HardwareOC benchmark which can be found at hocbench.com and 2Manydownloads.
With all that out of the way, it's time to dive right into the actual drive fight and the first ring to visit is the one set up by Futuremark.
Making its mark right from the start, the GeForce 180.43 proved to be 4.1% and 3.4% faster than the WHQL-ed 178.24 in the PhysX and PhysX-less benchmarks respectively. It's quite a promising start but not enough to justify the update. Let's continue.
The second test meant the second win for Nvidia's newest driver which returned an average score some 7 frames per second higher than that of the GeForce 178.24.
In Unreal Tournament III the difference between the two drivers on test shrunk to just 1.5 FPS but it's worth noting that it is in favor of the GeForce 180.43 beta. It's a flawless victory for the 180.43 up to here but there are still three more tough hurdles until the finish line so turn to page two and don't forget to cheer for your favorite.
Page 01: Introduction and testing
Page 02: More testing and conclusion
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