Conclusion

The results for all three versions of Nvidia GeForce graphics card driver turned out pretty predictable, though not in everything – in some cases we found something very interesting. Let’s take a closer look at the summary charts starting with the top model of GeForce 200 family among our today’s testing participants:

We immediately notice pretty significant performance drop in Left 4 Dead game in 1280x1024 and 1680x1050 resolutions once we upgraded GeForce version 182.08 with GeForce 185.85. And only installation of the latest GeForce 186.18 improved the situation. So, looks like the last official Nvidia driver does in fact have some improvements that can have a pretty serious effect on gaming performance, even though there is no mention of it in the driver release notes. It is certainly great that they resolved the issue from version 185.85. Other than that, GeForce 185.85 and 186.18 are identical, but we would still recommend installing the latest one available at the time. First, it has a number of resolved issues, and second, Left 4 Dead may be not the only game affected, because we simply have no resources to cover all existing popular gaming in our reviews.

Single-processor cards based on G200/G200b gain no more than 15% by switching from GeForce version 185.85 to version 186.18. However, this gain takes place in a larger number of games and is more distinct than with GeForce GTX 295. It indicates that Nvidia is working on improving the performance of not only rare and expensive multi-GPU solutions, but also more popular single-chip gaming cards. I would like to stress that performance in Left 4 Dead is again affected by GeForce 185.85 driver. It doesn’t have any influence on the gaming comfort for the payer, but indicates that Nvidia software developers had in fact made some kind of mistake that was later fixed in GeForce 186.18. This is the version that we recommend installing for all Nvidia cards on G200 architecture.

However, when it comes to graphics accelerators based on the previous generation Nvidia G92 solution, it is the latest GeForce version 186.18 that performed worst of all in Left 4 Dead, while the older version 185.85 did just as well as 182.08. In all other cases version 185 and 186 worked the almost same and in Fallout 3 completely defeated the old 182.08 driver leaving it over 30% behind in 1280x1024. It is pretty hard to recommend something here, but we dare insist that GeForce 186.18 should probably be the best choice even for the owners of G92/G92b/G94 based cards and solutions on other previous generation Nvidia chips, because the performance drop in Left 4 Dead is not dramatic, you can’t really notice it with a naked eye. Besides, the benefits from resolved issues and increased stability make up well for the drop.

 As a result, we can recommend all owners of corresponding graphics accelerators to upgrade to GeForce version 186.18. This driver version doesn’t have any evident advantages over the previous version 185.85 in terms of gaming performance, but it has a number of fixed issues that may be crucial in your particular case. Overall, our experience shows that it always makes sense to install the latest software version, because it will guarantee high performance and stability of the contemporary gaming platforms.

As for Ambient Occlusion, this ability to enable this option is of extreme interest for those gamers who value high image quality and level of detail in the game world. As a result, we decided to dedicate an individual article to this feature of Nvidia graphics solutions, so that we could find out if the improvements are worth losing some of the performance. Stay tuned, as it will be coming out shortly!