Testbed and Methods

We are going to investigate the performance of three Nvidia GeForce driver versions using the following testbed:

• Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition processor (3.2GHz, 6.4 GT/s QPI);  
• Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme mainboard (Intel X58 Express chipset);
• Corsair XMS3-12800C9 (3x2GB, 1333MHz, 9-9-9-24, 2T);
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 HDD (250GB, Serial ATA-150, 16MB buffer);
• Enermax Galaxy DXX EGX1000EWL 1000W power supply;
• Dell 3007WFP monitor (30", 2560x1600@60Hz max display resolution);
• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP2 64-bit;
• Nvidia GeForce 182.08 WHQL
• Nvidia GeForce 185.85 WHQL
• Nvidia GeForce 186.18 WHQL

The first driver version of the three was configured as follows:

• Texture filtering – Quality: High quality
• Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization: Off
• Texture filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
• Vertical sync: Force off
• Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On
• Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling
• Multi-display mixed-GPU acceleration: Multiple display performance mode
• Set PhysX GPU acceleration: Enabled
• Other settings: default

Version 185.85 and 186.16 were configured in the following way:

• Texture filtering – Quality: High quality
• Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization: Off
• Texture filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
• Threaded optimization: Auto
• Vertical sync: Force off
• Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On
• Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling
• Multi-GPU performance mode: NVIDIA recommended
• Multi-display mixed-GPU acceleration: Multiple display performance mode
• Set PhysX GPU acceleration: Enabled
• Ambient Occlusion: Off
• Other settings: default

This time we included the following games and benchmarks into our testing suite:

• Crysis Warhead
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
• Far Cry 2
• Left 4 Dead
• Fallout 3
• Mirror’s Edge
• Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

We selected the highest possible level of detail in each game using standard tools provided by the game itself from the gaming menu. We didn’t use any non-standard settings, except a few situations, described separately later in the article.

For our tests we chose three most typical representatives of Nvidia GeForce family:

• Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 (2xG200b, 576/1242/1998MHz, 480sp, 160tmu, 56rbe, 2x448-bit, 2x896 MB GDDR3)
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 (G200b, 648/1476/2484MHz, 240sp, 80tmu, 32rbe, 512-bit, 1024MB GDDR3)
• Nvidia GeForce GTS 250  (G92b, 738/1836/2200MHz, 128sp, 64tmu, 16rbe, 256-bit, 1024MB GDDR3)

We ran our tests in the following resolutions: 1280x1024, 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. The last resolution wasn’t used for GeForce GTX 250. We added MSAA 4x antialiasing to the standard anisotropic filtering 16x in all tests. We enabled antialiasing from the game’s menu. If this was not possible, we forced it using the appropriate Nvidia GeForce driver settings.

Performance was measured with the games’ own tools using the original demos. We measured not only the average speed, but also the minimum speed of the cards if possible. If there were no built-in tools for taking performance readings, we used Fraps utility version 2.9.8 to record our performance measurements in these games. In the latter case we ran the test three times and took the average of the three readings for further performance analysis.