NVIDIA 337.50 Driver Analysis - Single GPU and SLI Tested

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Today I will be looking at seemingly random collection of gaming titles, running on some reconfigured test bed we had in the office in an attempt to get some idea of the overall robustness of the 337.50 driver and its advantages over the 335.23 release that came before it. Does NVIDIA have solid ground to stand on when it comes to the capabilities of current APIs over what AMD is offering today?

Not every game or hardware setup is going to have performance advantages like the ones we witnessed on these two pages. Our results alone show plenty of places where performance improved less than 1-2% and several where performance was exactly the same. I would expect that to be the case for the majority of games and the majority of hardware configurations - your experience is going to vary just as much as our did. Other outlets have written about these driver changes with similar levels of success, falling somewhere between where NVIDIA PR wanted us to see it and where AMD's influencer society wanted us to see it.

So, should you upgrade your GeForce card to the latest 337.50 driver release? I think that goes without saying - any performance gain a PC user can get for free with their hardware is going to be welcome. And for those users that see better than the 5%+ gains in a favorite gaming title, NVIDIA comes off looking like a savior. For the rest we can look at the 337.50 driver as the first step in NVIDIA's goal of continued DirectX 11 optimization that will continue for as long as AMD touts the Mantle API as a key selling point. Gamers are getting free performance and that's something I think we all can agree is good for our community.

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Before this driver on hitman absolution i was struggling to get over 70fps and major stuttering on top of that sleeping dogs had the same thing now i get well over 120fps on both of these games.. however i have noticed that my oc settings on my gpu do not work for any game now and i find that games will crash so thats depressing

TheRAMPAGEHD

Thanks for doing all the testing, I'm a bit gutted there's no 4770k and 780 results though.

davideverett

I actually saw a very large improvement in my modded Skyrim which will now never drop below 60FPS

Willard_guy

I tested 337.50 on my PC and I never had so many issues in such a short time. I only had on my PC for 20 hours....I really hope that The DirectX 11 drivers get more efficient as the release of DX12 is not as soon as I would like.

massa

can you maybe compare systems with lower end cpus? maybe drop the cards in the pentium and x4 760k systems that you used for the super budget build?

nottony

I have a single GTX 780, an i5 3570K, and 8g of RAM and I have some pretty incredible improvements with this driver. I noticed a particularly good improvements in Metro LL and Thief (2014), in both these games I saw 10-30 fps improvements.

scottster

I tested out 337.50 with the 750Ti, I'm actually seeing an increase on it. Before I had to turn down graphics settings in F1 2013, Battlefield 4, Guild Wars 2, etc. when swapping out the R9 280X for the 750Ti but with 337.50 I can leave the settings (max) as is and still get 50-60fps and in some occasions 70fps (F1 2013 does 100-110fps). Planetside 2 and Red Orchestra 2 so far are the only games I really had to turn down the graphhics a little.

On my 760 2GB, I saw no real difference at all, 337.50 is basically aiming at the newer 700 series cards, especially the 750/750Ti.

BSDShoes

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EdwarioERS

I believe that Nvidia holds back the performance on SLI scaling so they can sell there higher end cards at higher prices. Nvida wants to sell titan and titan z's but why would you ever spend 2999 on a titan z if you could get the same performance from two 780 ti's that cost 1400. I own 2 x 780 ti's and i believe performance could scale better if sli was properly integrated. example: Bf4 1080p 1x 780 ti 90 to 100 fps, 2x 780 it 100-130 fps if the profiles were properly integrate there should a 60 to 100% scaling not 20 - 30%. My point is its 2014 Sli scaling should have drastically improved since 2004 we should all be getting 90-100% scaling.

TheInsomnatech

These drivers worked wonders for my 780 ti sli rig 20 fps increase sin ac3, crysis 3 and metro last light. And yes this did matter cause I wasn't getting a smooth frame rate at 1440p before this. No problems with it so far

rickylow

my cpu wasnt the bottleneck so fps gain was not so big (1-2fps on some games)

rubikfan

I'm skeptic of this, here's my experience: I'm running SLI GT755m. With the 335.23 drivers I was getting 92fps in Sniper Elite V2. Nvidia claims over 50% increase with SLI running Sniper Elite V2. But what I got with the 337.50 drivers was an average of 95fps. That's not even 5%.

malamri

You really should have tested this driver with varying degrees of lower tier CPUs and GPUs, not just the really high end stuff.

jordantiller

did nvidia just not realize about the sli profile or did they fudge the truth about fps gains to sell cards

plasma

My Skyrim would hang here an there every once in awhile for a second or two. Now after installing this driver my FPS is much more level an it doesn't hang anymore.

A-10 6700 AMD HD 8670D Quad-Core 3.7ghz (IGPU Disabled)
EVGA GTX 750ti Superclocked (337.50 Beta)
8gb Ram 1600mhz (Single Dimm)
Windows 8.1 (Latest Update)
Asus A55FM2 Motherboard

cotyskaj