Nvidia's GeForce GTX 480: Before And After A Year Of Driver Updates
Table of contents
- 1. One Year Of GeForce Drivers
- 2. Performance Enhancements: Beta Drivers
- 3. Test Hardware And Benchmarks
- 4. Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11 (DX11)
- 5. Benchmark Results: Metro 2033 (DX11)
- 6. Benchmark Results: Lost Planet 2 (DX11)
Are you dutiful about keeping your drivers up-to-date? Nvidia does a pretty good job of maintaining a regular release schedule. Today we look at how much performance you can expect from an old card in new games using four driver packages.
Everyone is looking for more performance, which is the main reason why anyone bothers to update his or her graphics driver. We already analysed AMD's driver-based performance gains in AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Before And After A Year Of Driver Updates. Over the course of a year, someone gaming on the Radeon HD 5870 can look forward to a roughly 5% bump in performance with a few rare exceptions. More important, grabbing each of AMD's Catalyst updates ensures proper compatibility with games like Lost Planet 2, F1 2010, and Metro 2033.
That's the case for AMD and its cards. But what about Nvidia?
The company has spent a great deal of time and money cultivating partnerships with game developers, often to the bemoaning of non-Nvidia owners who feel their gaming experience gets unfairly penalized. You have to wonder exactly what this means. Is this just a matter of getting more face time before a game launches? Or does this translate into early optimization in driver development? More precisely, if you own Nvidia hardware, you want to know if you are going to see more improvements than if you had bought a Radeon.
Let’s put this into perspective. If we look back to the last generation of GeForce cards as an example, the GeForce GTX 480 was released in late March 2010. It’s still a decent card, performing close to the more recently released GeForce GTX 570. But do you remember how long you waited for Nvidia’s first DX11 GPU? It was released seven months after AMD launched the Radeon HD 5870.
| Driver | Date |
|---|---|
| GeForce/Ion Driver 266.58 | 1/18/11 |
| GeForce/Ion Driver 260.99 | 10/25/10 |
| GeForce/Ion Driver 260.89 | 10/18/10 |
| GeForce/Ion Driver 258.96 | 7/29/10 |
| GeForce/Ion Driver 257.21 | 6/15/10 |
| GeForce Driver 197.75 | 5/10/10 |
| GeForce Driver 197.41 | 4/9/10 |
After waiting seven months, you are probably holding off on your next upgrade. Until that time, you must rely on drivers to improve your performance beyond where it sits today. Unlike AMD, Nvidia doesn’t release drivers on a monthly basis. For example, since the GTX 480 was released, we have had seven drivers posted.
If you update drivers regularly, then you are probably familiar with the Nvidia's performance claims. You see them every time you download a new software package. We want to know exactly how much these updates really matter to real-world gaming. Have all of the company's downloads been worthwhile installations? We’re selecting four drivers spanning the GeForce GTX 480’s current life to find out.
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Are the driver improvements solely aimed at games or do we also see some gains with CUDA? Many Thanks.
Are the driver improvements solely aimed at games or do we also see some gains with CUDA? Many Thanks.
That's a really good question. In a few words, graphic driver improvements are aimed solely at games (stability and performance.) There is a reason for this. When a CUDA application performs a calculation, it uses programming calls from the CUDA library. This is separate from the graphics driver, and it's something that NVIDIA updates less often. (The same goes for AMD's APP). It is the CUDA library and CUDA application that ultimately determines the efficiency of GPGPU performance.
Say you wanted to obtain the sum of all integers from 1 to N:
int i, sum = 0;
for (i = 1; i <= N; i++)
sum += i;
printf ("sum: %d\n", sum);
this can be rewritten as
int sum = (N * (N+1)) / 2;
printf ("sum: %d\n", sum);
If N were sufficiently small and hardware performed addition and looping faster than it did multiplication and bit-shifting, this wouldn't be an improvement. But this is an example of making code within a program more efficient and perhaps more performance oriented. When NVIDIA updates its CUDA library, generally we are dealing with either a complier optimization (developer side) or a run-time optimization (user side).
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
Wow. Pity about the WoW stats. Dropped the ball there!
A little careless letting slip with WoW. Not that it matters, 480 is plenty power regardless, but given how popular that game is (for whatever reason) you would have thought making sure the update at least kept things the same with tat game would have been smart
Humm, you should activate directx 11 on WOW. It really gives a good boost on fps and might shift results with the most recent drivers.
Turning on DX11 gives a boost to frame rates?