New Nvidia Drivers Boost Up Fermi Performance

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The new drivers that came out with GTX 460 support make the entire Fermi family faster.

Along with the GeForce GTX 460 release yesterday, Nvidia also brought out some new drivers to support it. But even for those without the new 460 GPU, any gamer with a Fermi-based GPU will be able to realize some performance gains in the 258.96 WHQL-candidate drivers.

· Adds additional performance increases for GeForce GTX 400 Series GPUs in several PC games (these improvements are in addition to the previously reported Release 256 improvements). The following are examples of some of the most significant improvements measured with GeForce GTX 480. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration: Up to 11% in Aliens vs. Predator (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF – Tessellation on)Up to 7% in Crysis: Warhead (SLI – 1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF – Gamer)Up to 4% in H.A.W.X (SLI – 1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF – Very High)Up to 10% in Just Cause 2 (SLI – 1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF - Concrete Jungle)Up to 6% in Metro 2033 (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF – Tessellation on)Up to 7% in Metro 2033 (SLI – 1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF – Tessellation on)Up to 10% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF)Up to 12% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (SLI – 1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF)Up to 4% in World in Conflict (SLI – 1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF)

Grab those drivers right here (be sure to select the GTX 460 in the pull down to get the new release mentioned in this post).

UPDATE July 19: These are now WHQL now.

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Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
49 Comments Comment from the forums
  • joytech22
    Pretty impressive that after 2 driver releases, they improved performance on the new architecture by almost 20% across the board!
    Reply
  • Onyx2291
    Most of it is just SLI though. Too bad I don't even have one of these cards.
    Reply
  • HardwareJay
    I don't do games. I'm using my GTX-470 for video editing with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. Should I get this update?
    Reply
  • atamarashi
    Seems to be a great deal of benefits found with these drivers, I wonder if they're worth the upgrade from 197.13 for a GTX 200 series card...
    Reply
  • Mousemonkey
    9222379 said:
    Seems to be a great deal of benefits found with these drivers, I wonder if they're worth the upgrade from 197.13 for a GTX 200 series card...
    It couldn't hurt to try, I'm using them on my little 9500GT and my desktop is performing great! :lol:
    Reply
  • doron
    Why would you ever need a 470 for adobe premiere? I remember fiddling with the premiere 6 with my old athlon xp 1600mhz and geforce 3 ti200... Was slow as hell but usable..

    Seriously, did adobe include some heavy graphic editing in their pro cs5 or is it just a good-ole overkill?
    Reply
  • jedimasterben
    9222375 said:
    I don't do games. I'm using my GTX-470 for video editing with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. Should I get this update?
    It wouldn't hurt to give it a shot.

    9222379 said:
    Seems to be a great deal of benefits found with these drivers, I wonder if they're worth the upgrade from 197.13 for a GTX 200 series card...
    See above comment ^ :)

    9222386 said:
    It couldn't hurt to try, I'm using them on my little 9500GT and my desktop is performing great! :lol:
    The little 9500 that could! :lol:

    9222387 said:
    Why would you ever need a 470 for adobe premiere? I remember fiddling with the premiere 6 with my old athlon xp 1600mhz and geforce 3 ti200... Was slow as hell but usable..

    Seriously, did adobe include some heavy graphic editing in their pro cs5 or is it just a good-ole overkill?
    Yeah, Adobe has been putting a lot of effort into GPU acceleration. I don't know much about Premier, but I use Photoshop a lot, and it definitely speeds up a lot of tasks for me.
    Reply
  • meat81
    joytech22Pretty impressive that after 2 driver releases, they improved performance on the new architecture by almost 20% across the board!
    True!

    Nvidia has always had solid drivers that solve more problems, not create them like another video card maker we know.... :)
    Reply
  • Stryter
    meat81True!Nvidia has always had solid drivers that solve more problems, not create them like another video card maker we know....
    Well, that is not entirely true. To be fair, nVidia has had their fair share of screw-ups with with their drivers. They have on a few occassions now, introduced some annoying and even nasty, harmful bugs into their drivers (i.e. the fan speed control bug). But, the drivers have been getting better again which is always welcome.

    I'll have to check these drivers out when I get home, though I will probably keep my eye on their forums just to make sure their aren't any problems reported, before I download them.
    Reply
  • victomofreality
    meat81True!Nvidia has always had solid drivers that solve more problems, not create them like another video card maker we know....
    WTF are you smoking? ATI and Nvidia both have buggy drivers from time to time... just a few months ago they released some bad ones like the one that killed the ability to oc the cards. Don't be blinded by your fanboydom.
    Reply