nVidia ForceWare 81.84 BETA Performance Analysis

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Now we've all had a chance to have a good look at the new nVidia drivers in action, TweakTown have posted a comprehensive performance analysis.

"A couple of days ago nVidia released their much talked about ForceWare Release 80 graphics card driver to the world. The new nVidia ForceWare 81.84 BETA drivers offer such things as performance optimizations when using Dual-Core processors, mixed vendor support for SLI and Black and White 2 support. We examine the drivers in our typical fashion against the last official release driver, ForceWare 78.01. Do the new drivers give some more punch to nVidia’s current line-up of GPU’s? Read on for the answers!"

View: Full Article @ TweakTown

CHANGELOG:
Major Changes

Added auto completion to the directory page

Fixed a bug, introduced in 2.09, that caused AllowRootDirInstall to fail

Fixed a thread leak in the POSIX implementation of LZMA

VPatch 3.1: MD5 checksums, better performance, and some bug fixes (including bug #1219806)

Minor Changes

Added rounding of required and available size on the directory page (1.59 => 1.6 instead of 1.5)

Added WS_EX_LEFTSCROLLBAR style in RTL mode (bug #1283528)

Fixed alteration of the working directory by FileRequest in InstallOptions (bug #1287731)

Fixed bad mnemonic key in MakeNSISw menu (bug #1288159)

Minor documentation improvements and fixes

Modern UI 1.74: Fixed compile error when checkboxes are used on multiple finish pages

Translations

Fixed a bug in Slovenian translation that caused lots of missing language string warnings

Fixed typos in Serbian translation

Fixed typos in Thai translation

Updated Simple Chinese translation

Build System

Automatic fix for VC6 SP6 compile error

Moved most of the configuration from config.h to the build system

Removed all optimizations and symbol stripping in debug mode

SCons requirement updated to 0.96.91

VPatch can be built on POSIX as well

#1 Max™ on 07 Oct 2005 - 14:14

Seems like a really good speed jump to me! Although this is all in aid of ATI introducing their new graphics cards, nVidia always had something up their sleeve to tweak the performance of these cards.

Installing now.

(1 reply) #2 Lefhark on 07 Oct 2005 - 15:48

Too bad this driver introduced some tile texture rendering issues for my 6600gt in Guild Wars. Had to readjust the graphics quality level manually after each terrain load to make the ground look as it was supposed to (and yeah, quality level was set to "high quality" in the nvidia control panel). Back on 78.05 for now which is noticably slower but doesn't have this bug.

#2.1 parithon on 07 Oct 2005 - 23:35

Welcome to the beta world

But at least you can be assured that it will be fixed, did you bug it?

#3 j0j081 on 08 Oct 2005 - 07:23

I am really excited about the upcoming official release. My prediction is end of next week.

#4 Jugalator on 08 Oct 2005 - 19:53

Looks useful for SLI owners. For me and my 6600GT I still wonder though, given the results for at least the 6800GT, except in 1024x768 Far Cry where that card took a sudden and unexpected leap in 15 fps. In higher resolutions, these drivers for that card were sometimes slightly slower though.

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