NVIDIA ForceWare 257.21 Driver Performance @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
Staff member
Joined
May 18, 1997
Messages
55,651
NVIDIA ForceWare 257.21 Driver Performance - NVIDIA’s new ForceWare 257.21 WHQL driver takes a giant leap in version numbers, but does it take a giant leap in real-world gaming performance? We found at least one scenario where it does! You surely don’t want to miss the giant leap in Transparency Antialiasing performance experienced in Battlefield: Bad Company 2.
 
I saw on the nvidia page where there was a link to the 3d vision driver but it wasnt clear about the 3 way capability. Any info on that one yet Kyle? Ive got 2 more 22' 120hz viewsonics coming my way to take advantage of it when it finally comes to fruition.
 
Is that actually a leap in performance or just a result of less buggy drivers? As I understand it, and as Nvidia has explained it, previous implementation of TRAA was broken such that it actually gave you SSAA instead, which would explain the performance discrepancy.
 
Kidfinger said:
I saw on the nvidia page where there was a link to the 3d vision driver but it wasnt clear about the 3 way capability. Any info on that one yet Kyle? Ive got 2 more 22' 120hz viewsonics coming my way to take advantage of it when it finally comes to fruition.
Click to expand...


This driver does NOT support NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround. Soon. Very soon.
 
This driver caused me some odd slow down/stuttering in WOW and HON, I read on some other sites it might be caused by a 2D/3D clock porfile settings.
Any others having this same problem?
 
Nice to see free performance boosts for those people who bought the 400 series!
 
Keep in mind if you are using MSI Afterburner, EVGA Precision or Riva tuner you still need to untick the fan speed monitoring option in the settings (not in the graph but the settings under monitoring). The polling rates cause stutter in games with 257.15 and 257.21 otherwise.
 
As i posted in other I do get lag spikes /slow down/stuttering with these with most games revert back to last drivers all is good again.

I keep PhysX disabled but these enbled it and don't let me disable it. I think its PhysX related myself.

No afterburn or evga program is being used.
 
i don't install drivers often, and I was wondering if I installed this driver correctly. in the properties of my GTX 260, it says I have driver version 8.17.12.5721. it doesn't say anything about 257.21. did i install it correctly? thanks hardforum
 
dleib said:
i don't install drivers often, and I was wondering if I installed this driver correctly. in the properties of my GTX 260, it says I have driver version 8.17.12.5721. it doesn't say anything about 257.21. did i install it correctly? thanks hardforum
Click to expand...

Maybe it is the excerpt that I bolded for you? Honest question because I used to get confused by the two "different"? ways that Nvidia likes to show the driever rev.
 
So if Transparacy AA is drastically better in Battlefield:BC2 - does that indicate it might be way better in any game you attach the NVidia override AA settings to?
 
Really nice to see a breakdown on these driver updates. I wish you could do it for every driver release, but I know "time and money".
 
This is why I love PC gaming. You buy a new system or a video card and 3-6 months later a mature driver comes out that gives you better performance in current games. The performance gains were much needed. :D
 
I ***LOVE*** these types of comparisons!

Got one for the latest ATI drivers? :)
 
eddieck said:
What about vanilla Surround? (Apologies if this is a stupid question, but I think they're two different things, right?)

Also, I'm pretty sure the massive transparency AA improvement is due to the old drivers actually applying SSAA to the entire image. Better image quality, very bad frame rate.
Click to expand...

Yeah this point, which I also raised earlier, seems to have been missed entirely? Nvidia also released some tool that lets you retain the "bug" so that we can at least use SSAA without requiring nHancer - which is a good thing since nHancer is bust with the 257 drivers.
 
I'm sorry to report that 257.21 does not remove the hitching/stuttering from Fallout 3 which was introduced after 188.xx. I am inclined now to believe that this is not Nvidia's problem and that Bethesda made bad assumptions about video card drivers. For details on how to roll back to 188.25 specifically for Fallout 3, see my post on the matter here.
 
Do these drivers help performance with the GTX 2xx series cards? Or mostly just the Fermi cards?
 
Will it help PhysX performance on a 260-216, because the Hybrid PhysX 1.03 patch doesn't work with this new driver yet, according to the author.
 
eddieck said:
What about vanilla Surround? (Apologies if this is a stupid question, but I think they're two different things, right?)

Also, I'm pretty sure the massive transparency AA improvement is due to the old drivers actually applying SSAA to the entire image. Better image quality, very bad frame rate.
Click to expand...

Regular Surround and 3DVision Surround will come at the same time.
 
WhiteFireDragon said:
i'm going to echo this. i have a bunch of older cards, and wondering if this also benefits the old cards.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure Nvidia squeezed out most of the performance of the old GTX2xx cards already. After all they launched 2 years ago.
 
Installed these drivers this morning and my PC bluescreens on startup.

Config:
AMD 4600
Geforce 9800 GTX
WinXP

Older hardware, for certain, but I've never had this issue before.

  • Did a "startup with last known good configuration" resulted in the same bluescreen.
  • Start in safemode and reinstalled latest driver. Still bluescreens.
  • Will likely have to do an uninstall in safemode and reinstall the last driver package
 
Anyone know if these drivers offer any performance increases to those with older 200 series cards.
Anyone try it on a GTX285 ?
 
interested said:
Anyone know if these drivers offer any performance increases to those with older 200 series cards.
Anyone try it on a GTX285 ?
Click to expand...

They are more stable than the betas for me. I no longer receive bsod's or errors in MW2 or BFBC2. As for performance, I play games at decent settings and do not benchmark things. I would say I do not see anything noticeable as far as performance increase or decrease. That being said, I have never seen a noticeable difference in drivers.
 
Thanks for this had no idea.... I play BF2BC but haven't noticed any stuttering should I still turn it off? I'm on a GTX 470. I use the EVGA Precision tool.
 
Crossing fingers cross for Nvidia to keep thier timeline for this surround gaming. And hopefully multi-mode for my PLP setup.
 
Yes it improves performance on some older cards too. There was a lot of talk about this in the forums when Kyle originally linked the beta version.

Interesting fact: Re run your Windows Experience Index scores, your video card rating will improve with these drivers.
 
Ultima99 said:
Interesting fact: Re run your Windows Experience Index scores, your video card rating will improve with these drivers.
Click to expand...
Mine went down on my 295 by .1. Changed no settings other than the drivers.:)
 
What I wonder is how do these perform with GTX-200 series cards? As it seems Nvidia doesn't normally optimize their drivers for more than one series...
 
OK, I know I didn't get the exact number before, but these drivers are incredible on the AvP DX11 Benchmark

I was barely able to get 10fps with the settings below. My wife came up behind me when I was running the test and dropped a "wow".

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80GHz
CPU ID: Intel64 Family 6 Model 30 Stepping 5
Motherboard: EVGA EVGA P55 SLI E657 Ibex Peak
Installed RAM: 3.99 GB
Operating System: Windows 7 x64
Video adapter: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470
Video Processor: GeForce GTX 470
Video driver: 8.17.12.5721 ()

1920 x 1080/Very High/High/16/SSAO On/TS On/AS On/4X
DirectX 11


Number of frames: 2506
Average Frame Time: 41.8ms
Average FPS: 23.9

==============================================
 
So is the improvement in BC2 the biggest improvement ever made by a driver release? This kind of thing seems usual from team red (no slam intended) because their drivers seem to always bring a bit of a performance increase with each new release, but its a surprise to see so much of an increase with team green: maybe due to the new Fermi architecture? It would be interesting to hear about the development of the drivers and if there was an epiphany moment experienced while going over the code.
Cant wait to try these with BC2 on my GTX260 at 1900 x 1200 on my newly resurrected SOYO 24"!
 
How is everyone installing these drivers?

Driver Cleaner type program first, or just installing over the old ones?
 
I used a driver sweeper, work fine.

I am not noticing such huge improvement in BC2 (fps actually blows) but other games run fine.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top