by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko
06/21/2009 | 04:20 PM
The last version of Nvidia GeForce driver that we reviewed on our site was 182.08 WHQL. Besides performance improvement in a number of games, Nvidia provided all GeForce 8, 9 and 200 solutions with full OpenGL 3.0 and hardware PhysX acceleration support. Judging by the results of those tests we concluded that Nvidia was not focusing on optimizing their drivers for specific games or multi-GPU solutions, but was trying to improve the performance in general.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to check out the GeForce 185.85 version that became a new milestone in Nvidia Drivers evolution. However, this driver does increase the performance in the following games quite significantly:
Besides, there appeared Ambient Occlusion support that could improve shadows and lighting quality by calculating the intensity of light reaching a certain spot on the surface in question. This method is somewhat like “global lighting”, because it also works on the global level – the lighting of an object depends on other objects present in the scene.
Unfortunately, there is nothing free in this world and the price we pay for significantly improved lighting is noticeable performance drop with Ambient Occlusion enabled. Moreover, the ability to force this option makes it ideologically similar to ATI Truform technology that could potentially improve models level of detail by applying tessellation, but in reality made all models look somewhat “blown out”, even those that didn’t seem to need any tessellation at all. As a result, it is quite possible that enabling Ambient Occlusion may in fact worsen the image quality in a game, which engine is not designed to support this lighting model. Nevertheless, it is good to have this option available, because it offers gamers a choice. So far 22 games support this technology and there is a corresponding Ambient Occlusion profile in the driver for them. You can check out the list of games on nZone web-site.
The new Nvidia GeForce driver version 186.18 for some reason was renamed from 185 to 186 even though the release notes only mentioned resolving some of the existing issues, but not improving the performance. Nevertheless, we decided to check if any performance changes actually took place. We also ran the tests for the previous version GeForce 185.85 and took GeForce 182.08 as a starting point for our comparative analysis, as it was the first version to support GeForce GTS 250 family.
We are going to investigate the performance of three Nvidia GeForce driver versions using the following testbed:
The first driver version of the three was configured as follows:
Version 185.85 and 186.16 were configured in the following way:
This time we included the following games and benchmarks into our testing suite:
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:
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.
All three versions of GeForce drivers perform almost identically for dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295, except for the slight minimal performance increase in 1920x1200 provided by version 185.85 or 186.18. Things get much more interesting for single-GPU solutions: 185 driver release did in fact increase the average speed in this game. The gain didn’t hit the promised 22%, but in 1920x1200 we got between 14% and 16%, which is also quite good. It is also obvious that GeForce version 186.18 and 185.85 are equal in terms of performance, so there is no rush in upgrading with the new version.
We have always included this game into the list of our regular benchmarks for the new ATI and Nvidia drivers, because its engine is based on OpenGL API. The built in fps limited can be disabled in the gaming console.
OpenGL 3.0 support appeared back in GeForce 182.08, but we can’t say that the following GeForce driver versions do not affect the performance in Quake Wars. We see pretty big gain by single-processor Nvidia solutions in 1920x1200 resolution: 15% for GeForce GTX 285 and a little below 14% for GeForce GTS 250.
There is again no big difference between 185.85 and 186.18 versions, so you don’t have to hurry and install the latest version, unless you experienced some of the issues described in the release notes and need them fixed. Namely, one of the issues is incorrect forcing of anisotropic filtering from Nvidia control panel.
The improvement is obvious compared with GeForce 182.08. However, if you install GeForce 186.18, you may experience small performance drop that is why GeForce 185.85 version is currently the most optimal choice for Far Cry 2 game. The only case when you should upgrade to version 186.18, is if you experience any issues with version 185.85 functioning; however, we haven’t had any problems so far.
The developers claimed that in games based on Source engine the performance would improve only in 3-way or 4-way multi-GPU configurations. However, things turned out a little more complicated than that. When we upgraded from GeForce 182.08 to GeForce 185.85 the gaming performance dropped! It was not dramatic or even serious, but the fact was undeniable: the new driver proved less efficient than the old one for G20 based graphics accelerators. Installation of GeForce 186.18 resolved the issue: performance went back up and even improved compared with what we got with version 182.08.
The situation is different with G92 based graphics cards. Versions 182.08 and 185.85 performed equally, while with GeForce 186.08 driver the gaming performance dropped by 9-14% depending on the resolution. So, the owners of GeForce GTS 250, 9800 GT/GTX/GTX+ graphics cards and maybe also solutions on more powerful Nvidia chips, like G94< should better stick with version 185.85.
Things are much simpler with Fallout 3. GeForce 182.08 is logically an outsider again, while versions 185.85 and 186.18 are way ahead of it, especially on GeForce GTS 250, where average performance gain may exceed 30% in low resolutions. So, there is only one choice here: GeForce 186.18, because it not only offers the same performance as version 185.85, but also has certain issues resolved.
This game has an fps limited set at 60-62 fps by default. We managed to turn it off by editing the TdEngine.ini file.
Strange as it might seem, GeForce 182.08 showed the best minimal performance in low resolutions. However, the differences in average performance levels started showing only starting with 1680x1050. Moreover, the noticeable improvement of 7-11% occurred only for dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295. Despite the promises of 45% gain made in GeForce 185.85 release notes, we saw nothing even close to that. With GeForce GTX 285 the effect was not so dramatic: only in 2560x1600 the gain exceeded 2-3% and reached 8%. The performance gain from the new driver was also quite insignificant in the system equipped with GeForce GTS 250.
Trying to minimize the CPU influence in 3DMark Vantage we used the Extreme profile (1920x1200, 4x FSAA and anisotropic filtering).
Single-processor Nvidia solutions have barely reacted to the change in the driver version, while dual-processor GeForce GTX 295 worked the fastest with version 182.08. If we take a closer look at the final score of the graphics benchmarks, we will see that version 185.85 is the slowest, even though the difference from the leader here is only 213 points.
The results of individual benchmarks do not reveal anything new: the performance of all three Nvidia driver versions is practically the same. The only exception is 1920x1200 resolution in the first test confirming what we have already seen in final score diagrams.
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!