2012 NVIDIA Video Card Driver Performance Review @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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2012 NVIDIA Video Card Driver Performance Review - We are taking the time to look back at NVIDIA's driver performance and support for 2012. Last year NVIDIA introduced to the world the GeForce GTX 600 series video cards. We will be using a GeForce GTX 680 and a GTX 670 to compare 2012's WHQL driver performance over time to see if and how much performance has improved.
 
Thanks for the review [H] crew...looking forward to the AMD ones.

Also looking forward to AMD fixing their frame latency issues!
 
This was really weird when you test drivers on videocards released somewhere after March. and call it a review of drivers for a whole year?

By pidgeonwholing yourself to just the GTX 6XX series what does that tell the consumer about performance as a whole there plenty older videocards which could also give a better impression on performance increase or are you willing to show that Nividia only updates their drivers for the current series ?

The biggest credit that I have to give NVIDIA is releasing drivers with popular named games
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This is another thing which I find weird it is almost saying that you are just testing where Nvidia bothers improve their drivers.

The story as a whole I find lackluster and self congratulatory piece which has no substance.
 
Nice review.
A lot of work I'm sure.

I have to agree, the most obvious congratulation for nvidia is getting out drivers in advance of the biggest games that simply worked.

I'm really looking forward to the similar AMD review.

Since I have GPUs from both camps it will be interesting to see if my own impressions are bourne out.
 
Great article. Really sums up a ton of anecdotal evidence about Nvidia drivers. It's one of the primary reasons I purchase Nvidia cards.
 
Pieter3dnow said:
This was really weird when you test drivers on videocards released somewhere after March. and call it a review of drivers for a whole year?

By pidgeonwholing yourself to just the GTX 6XX series what does that tell the consumer about performance as a whole there plenty older videocards which could also give a better impression on performance increase or are you willing to show that Nividia only updates their drivers for the current series ?



This is another thing which I find weird it is almost saying that you are just testing where Nvidia bothers improve their drivers.

The story as a whole I find lackluster and self congratulatory piece which has no substance.
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The obvious answer to this criticism is that most readers on this site really only care about the top-end offering and the section below that. Most do not care how much (if any) gains were seen on last-gen cards. Most driver improvements almost always only effect the current generation of cards as it is. (If one notes the release notes of the driver releases)
 
Pieter3dnow said:
This is another thing which I find weird it is almost saying that you are just testing where Nvidia bothers improve their drivers.

The story as a whole I find lackluster and self congratulatory piece which has no substance.
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Then why waste your time reading it?
What would you do to improve it?

Why run GPUs that people on this forum don't buy? That's like going to the Corvette forum and looking at Chevette reviews.......waste of time.

This article did just what it was supposed to do......research the validity of the opinion that driver versions improve performance of the hardware with time.:D
 
Pieter3dnow said:
This was really weird when you test drivers on videocards released somewhere after March. and call it a review of drivers for a whole year?

By pidgeonwholing yourself to just the GTX 6XX series what does that tell the consumer about performance as a whole there plenty older videocards which could also give a better impression on performance increase or are you willing to show that Nividia only updates their drivers for the current series ?



This is another thing which I find weird it is almost saying that you are just testing where Nvidia bothers improve their drivers.

The story as a whole I find lackluster and self congratulatory piece which has no substance.
Click to expand...


while i agree its a bit weird, nvidia had no WHQL driver releases from october of 2011 to february of 2012(all though they had a crap load of broken beta drivers in that time span), so theres really nothing to test in that span so you might as well just go with the 680 which was released in march.
 
It would be nice if Hard|OCP included a BIT of the last gen GPUs (At least the top end ones in reviews) I find it helpful to gauge if I should spend another $400 on a video card or not. If I'm only picking up 5-8 FPS in games I play while keeping settings the same is it worth it to me? I have a GTX 570 and don't' have any issues in games I currently play but of course the thought of putting a GTX 670 in my system is inciting, does it make sense for me though? Maybe I'm too poor to keep up with everyone else these days even though I still consider myself a computer enthusiast I feel like this isn't a recent trend, almost no GPU reviews include the GTX 570 (And haven't since the GTX 670 first came out)
 
Informative, new type of review, doing the drivers over a course of time.

Good job guys.
 
Driver updates and driver stability were the two main reasons why I upgraded from an AMD 6850 to a nVidia GTX 660ti. Even though performance is roughly on par for the two (for me), I had quite a few crashes in my games with the AMD card. When I switched out to nVidia, all my games just worked.

I tried AMD, didn't like it, and I'll probably not go back to them for a while.
 
Nice review and I know it's time consuming as it is but I'd liked to have seen at least one 5xx series card thrown in. Driver release notes always list % improvements on recent older hardware too. I have experienced a stuttering problem in a game with 310.xx drivers though and have had to roll back to 306.97's for a fix so all's not always perfect. I reported it on the nVidia forums and the game's forums tho and nVidia is usually good with a fix in next release. I'm not playing FC3 yet so no biggie anyways. I look forward to the AMD review.
 
Pieter3dnow said:
This was really weird when you test drivers on videocards released somewhere after March. and call it a review of drivers for a whole year?

By pidgeonwholing yourself to just the GTX 6XX series what does that tell the consumer about performance as a whole there plenty older videocards which could also give a better impression on performance increase or are you willing to show that Nividia only updates their drivers for the current series ?

This is another thing which I find weird it is almost saying that you are just testing where Nvidia bothers improve their drivers.

The story as a whole I find lackluster and self congratulatory piece which has no substance.
Click to expand...

It may look funny, but there were some large gaps of time between NVIDIA WHQL drivers, during those gaps, a lot of little Beta drivers came out. However, the latest WHQL driver after them, contains all of the same fixes from the Beta drivers, it contains the culmination of the fixes/improvements. Therefore, if we were going to see any big performance jump, it would have been between that large gap, but we didn't so much. Performance didn't really pick up until October. And we clearly explained why lesser cards like 660 ti and 660 were not included.
 
Maplehamwich said:
Great idea for an article. I found it quite interesting.
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Yeah, my sentiments exactly. I will be purchasing a new card here shortly and I was really leaning towards AMD even though Iv'e been green for ages. This info here with the next review will be quite invaluable.
 
Frost_311 said:
It would be nice if Hard|OCP included a BIT of the last gen GPUs (At least the top end ones in reviews) I find it helpful to gauge if I should spend another $400 on a video card or not. If I'm only picking up 5-8 FPS in games I play while keeping settings the same is it worth it to me? I have a GTX 570 and don't' have any issues in games I currently play but of course the thought of putting a GTX 670 in my system is inciting, does it make sense for me though? Maybe I'm too poor to keep up with everyone else these days even though I still consider myself a computer enthusiast I feel like this isn't a recent trend, almost no GPU reviews include the GTX 570 (And haven't since the GTX 670 first came out)
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if you aren't having issues with your current card why upgrade? if you can't find a reason to justify upgrading to a newer card, then you probably don't need to upgrade(this is pretty much how i look at it to decide when i need to upgrade vs wanting to just for the sake of saying i upgraded something). you can still be an enthusiast without owning the absolute most top of the line system.
 
It's funny that the 306.97 drivers were specifically recommended for Mists of Pandaria.. When I saw that and loaded them up, it halved my framerate and caused WoW to crash every 5 minutes... Had to roll back to 296.31 drivers to fix it.

And it wasn't just me, the forums filled with people complaining about it. Kinda makes you wonder if they even actually test this stuff.
 
as I started reading this all I could think is what a time consuming review this is... I cant wait to see AMD cards and their increases/downfalls. I have long bleed Green for the reasons this reviews shows. NV doesn't always win the hardware race but it seems like time and time again they have a reliable track record on drivers. As a gamer (and not a benchmarker) that is the most important thing to me.

/NVLOVERANT

Thanks to Grady and Brent for the awesome review!
 
I read this entire "review" with my jaw dropped, are things so slow that this is what [H] are reverting to? [|H] with exclusive info... "drivers get better with later releases" shocker. Well duh I'd like to bloody think so.

I didn't read anything about the major vsync stutter issues I and many others were plagued with during the 1st few months after the GTX 680 and well in to the GTX 670 release. This issue was easy for review sites to miss because review sites never use vsync, but reading this article you would be forgiven for thinking the issue didn't exist at all. Lets not paint a rosey picture that Nvidia can do no wrong based on limited cherry picked data. The GTX 6x0 range did have their share of driver issues, it took months for Nvidia to fix the vsync stutter issue and there have been occassions where drivers for AAA games could have been better. What about the lack of SLI profiles for Far Cry 3 for example?
 
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ICDP said:
I read this entire "review" with my jaw dropped, are things so slow that this is what [H] are reverting to? [|H] with exclusive info... "drivers get better with later releases" shocker. Well duh I'd like to bloody think so.

I didn't read anything about the major vsync stutter issues I and many others were plagued with during the 1st few months after the GTX 680 and well in to the GTX 670 release. This issue was easy for review sites to miss because review sites never use vsync, but reading this article you would be forgiven for thinking the issue didn't exist at all. Lets not paint a rosey picture that Nvidia can do no wrong based on limited cherry picked data. The GTX 6x0 range did have their share of driver issues, it took months for Nvidia to fix the vsync stutter issue and there have been occassions where drivers for AAA games could have been better. What about the lack of SLI profiles for Far Cry 3 for example?
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There was Far Cry 3 SLI support on day 1 of game launch

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/12/05/far_cry_3_video_card_performance_preview/3
 
Brent_Justice said:
There was Far Cry 3 SLI support on day 1 of game launch

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/12/05/far_cry_3_video_card_performance_preview/3
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My apologies, I should have said lack of working/optimised SLI profiles for Farc Cry 3. For many the Far Cry 3 Nvidia SLI profile was broken in DX11 as it caused serious stutter. The only way to improve it was to use Nvidia inspector. It took until 310.70 drivers before it was fixed, up until this driver release many had to use a workaround using Nvidiainspector.

Herein lies the problem with "subjective opinion" based on 4 whole games. Making arbitrary statements that Nvidia is always consistent and have 0 day fixes or optimised drivers for the big name games is not entirely accurate. The Nvidia vsync stutter fix ran for months before finally getting fixed, howcome your article doesn't mention this serious issue? There were a few AAA games released in that period that stuttered like hell on my GTX 680 with vsync enabled. My only fix was to use Nvidiainspector to set FS caps.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
if you aren't having issues with your current card why upgrade? if you can't find a reason to justify upgrading to a newer card, then you probably don't need to upgrade(this is pretty much how i look at it to decide when i need to upgrade vs wanting to just for the sake of saying i upgraded something). you can still be an enthusiast without owning the absolute most top of the line system.
Click to expand...

I typically do only upgrade when I get a big performance boost or I notice I can't run the latest game with all the settings cranked but the appeal of the GTX 670 is the advantages of the Kepler GPU -over the 570- is getting not only higher performance but also better thermals and power usage which results in a cooler computer case for me and less fan noise from the video card (I'd love to watercool but just can't justify spending hundreds to cool my GPU when my DH-N14 does just fine for my CPU on air)

Anyway still a good article, my first comment was more of a general complaint about the lack of including older cards on reviews and benchmarks (I understand it takes longer to bench more cards) but I feel like I'm not alone in still being on a GTX 570 and it would be nice to see how it is still stacking up vs the newer gen chips.
 
Too bad they skipped the 660TI and all of it's driver problems.

Also... no Borderlands 2? The number one game of 2012? Losers.
 
Burticus said:
Too bad they skipped the 660TI and all of it's driver problems.

Also... no Borderlands 2? The number one game of 2012? Losers.
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BL2 is largely an irrelevant game to run benchmarks on because it's pretty much common knowledge that even fairly low-end systems can run it with pretty much maxed out settings. It's a waste of time to benchmark a game like that.
 
I am not quite sure if I am on the right track with this article's conclusion.

I am facing numerous issues with nVidia drivers right now, like DotA 2 with occasional crash and scaling glitch, while it did not happened on my AMD rig.
 
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