It's been a while since we've handled a an extensive overview of the performance of ForceWare drivers and I had some time to kill last weekend and thus decided to a little ForceWare performance comparison..

ForceWare drivers are reference based graphics card drivers that NVIDIA distributes to public or towards Graphics Card manufacturers. In general all NVIDIA Graphics Cards are supported by these drivers, most of them however should be considered Beta. Every driver you will see today can be found in our download section. So if you'd like to give a certain driver a go then just grab it, mind you that some if not most drivers are beta, meaning some systems or games can have issues with them. All the drivers in our test today at least passed the benchmarks, otherwise they would not have been included. What also needs to be mentioned as this test was specifically aimed at performance. No image quality tests will be found here as that would take at least a week to include.

In a recent poll we noticed that almost all of you run their games with optimizations enabled, and why shouldn't you ? In real-time game play you will definitely not see the differences with the naked eye. Therefore we opted to test the drivers with the optimizations enabled. We will test each driver 2x meaning one with IQ settings disabled thus 0xAA and 0xAF (no Anti aliasing and Anisotropic filtering enabled) and then a run with 4xAA and 8xAF to determine if you can see performance differences among the drivers.

I'd like to note here that drivers of course not are developed solely for performance. NVIDIa has several driver groups, example for their Quadro series, Consumer series, but also different developments lines that focus in group A for the newest upcoming product while group B for example is developing SLI where group C is working on game optimizations and group D on bug-fixes. In the past you have been able to see drivers released with a huge difference in build number, these are hypothetical reasons. Down the line the code comes together targeted for a specific audience or reason. We focus on only one small part of that today, performance.

The software's used in today's article will be Doom3, Far Cry Halo: Combat Evolved, Splinter Cell, Unreal tournament 2004 and one synthetic benchmark 3DMark05 (Business Edition). As you can see this is a selection of today's and most of all newer games forcing the graphics card to it's maximum.

All software is tested at with the highest possible in-game quality setting at:

The be able to do such a test you will need a current but most of all up--top-date system. Therefore we the test system used is the new PCI-Express Intel 915G  based Albatron Mars PX915G Pro with 512 MB DDR1 memory running at 400 MHz, Intel Pentium4 560 (3.6 GHz Prescott). The graphics card used is NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT reference model.

We have chosen to use such a high-end system as otherwise the results would be influenced by bottlenecks. For example, if we used a GeForce FX 5500 the results would be rendered absolutely useless as that graphics card is too slow for current games making the graphics card a bottleneck to be able to benchmark objectively. The same goes for the CPU, if we'd be using a too slow processor you'd see a flat limitation on performance as the graphics card would like to go faster yet the CPU can process game data fast enough.

So using a high-end system you are just making sure that all variables a fine-tuned to each other.

To maintain consistency the BIOS settings were set at default and apart from the normal driver settings except vsync disabled. After each test-run with a driver a re-ghosted the system to get a clean operating system.

 

 

 

 

Conclusion,

Well, that took more time then expected to ! General consensus is that performance game wise is very much the same throughout tall drivers. We observe minor FPS differences except in 3Dmark05. Mind you that in-between the first series 6x.xx drivers and the current 66.8x drivers a lot of time has passed. Both ATi and NVIDIA introduced legit optimizations in their drivers, DirectX 9.0c was released, the drivers undergone a transition from being 100% AGP compatible towards PCI-Express, Shader Model 3 support ect ect .. it's actually quite amazing that the drivers are all quite equal performance wise considering the state of the new test system. Image Quality wise I hardly noticed any real differences except a little gamma / contrast differences, nothing really interesting honestly.

We would have loved to tyest some additional drivers in the 60.xx series but GeForce 6800 GT and PCI-Express where not introduced back then. We did try a 60.72 driver yet it resulted in blue screens all the way; which makes sense.

So the conclusion here has to be that you need to look at the games you play most and adapt/use drivers that get you the best gameplay/performance. I highly recommend the series 66.xx drivers.