Everywhere you turn these days you see people saying that 2009 will be tough, with economic recession, more trouble in the Middle East and the filming of BloodRayne 3. Despite the grim outlook, this year has started on a high note for Nvidia graphics card owners as a new GeForce driver bearing a new feature and the potential of improved performance got trapped in the spider-less world wide web. Also coming with a rather high number jump - from 180.70/87/88 to 185.20, the driver features support for every GeForce desktop card from the 6 series up and adds a new tab in the Nvidia Control Panel that enables Ambient Occlusion, a lighting model that's supposed to bring more realism to 3D games.
As much as we like pretty, or prettier, games though, we're also looking for speed increases from new drivers, so, to properly test the GeForce 185.20 beta, it will have to go head to head with two of its older brothers, the WHQL-certified GeForce 180.48 and the GeForce 180.70 beta, in addition to showing us what this ambient occlusion is all about. For a clear picture of the performance offered by the three drivers mentioned we'll be using synthetic benchmarks and several DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 games, with one new addition being the Cryostasis TechDemo. Now go grab your popcorn but leave the drink because this, as you'll see, is going to be a bumpy ride.
Page 01: Introduction
Page 02: Test setup
Page 03: 3DMark06
Page 04: 3DMark Vantage
Page 05: Devil May Cry 4
Page 06: Unreal Tournament III
Page 07: Half-Life 2: Episode Two
Page 08: Crysis Warhead
Page 09: Far Cry 2
Page 10: Call of Duty: World at War
Page 11: Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason
Page 12: Ambient Occlusion - visual and performance impact
Page 13: Conclusion
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