Beta Nvidia 256 drivers now available

[tviceman]

With a plethora of speed increases depending on configurations, and also support for massive anti aliasing options.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7-winvista-64bit-257.15-beta.html

http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/18962

When these drivers reach WHQL, it would be nice if Anandtech and other sites retest the hd5850/5870 against the gtx470/480 with all the latest drivers.

 

[whitesammy]

hopefully they get some better bench scores. good post tviceman.

now we'll see is a 5770 CF will par with a 470 with mature drivers

 

[happy medium]

I hope to see some retests.

We all knew that there was more life in gtx series with the drivers, now lets see if ATI counters next week.

I remember post about how the gtx was so late that there drivers were allready mature.
I think ATI has allready shot there load with the 10.3 release, we shall see.
This should put the gtx 480 about 25% faster then the 5870.

It was allready 20% faster with this driver release on the 6th of May.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gigabyte-gf-gtx400_17.html#sect0

 

[Skurge]

did they aim for those settings or what, they are so specific. anyway, this does warrant a retest.

 

[Anarchist420]

I wish they would emulate dithering.

 

[MentalIlness]

I just updated to 197.45. I hope it fixes my Lost Planet Colonies crashing to desktop. Just closes the game...No pop up warnings or anything. Just like I exited the game.

 

[Keysplayr]

http://blogs.nvidia.com/ntersect/2010/05/introducing-the-new-256-driver-release.html

 

[Sylvanas]

So much awesome new stuff in this release, hope we see some benches before and after from the big review sites. The new SLI and Multi-GPU setup controls sound great (also which GPU to dedicate for CUDA or PhysX calcs) - I wonder if the dedicated CUDA GPU offloads CUDA specific in game options (Just Cause 2) or if it's just for video transcoding apps etc.

Up to 14% in Aliens vs. Predator (1920x1200 noAA/AF – Tessellation on)
Up to 4% in Batman: Arkham Asylum (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF PhysX=High)
Up to 5% in BattleForge (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF – Very High settings)
Up to 5% in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF)
Up to 4% in Crysis: Warhead (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF – Enthusiast setting)
Up to 24% in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (1920x1200 no AA/AF)
Up to 9% in Far Cry 2 (2560x1600 8xAA/16xAF)
Up to 25% in Just Cause 2 (2560x1600 no AA/AF - Concrete Jungle)
Up to 7% in Metro 2033 (1920x1200 no AA/16xAF – Tessellation on)
Up to 40% in Metro 2033 with SLI ((1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF – Tessellation on)
Up to 8% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (1920x1200 no AA/AF – Day)
Up to 110% in Stone Giant with SLI (2650x1600 – Tessellation on, DoF on)
Up to 6% in The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena (2560x1600 no AA/AF)
Up to 9% in Unigine: Tropics (2560x1600 no AA/AF – OpenGL)
Up to 5% in 3DMark Vantage (Performance and Extreme Presets)
Up to 19% with Transparency AA (1920x1200 4xTrSS – measured in Crysis)

Very awesome, warrants a retest. Metro2033 Tesselation and Stalker COP results most interesting. Also, +19% with TrAA? I wonder if they kept the 'bug' with SSAA in DX10/11- where's BFG?

OpenGL 4.0 – While we currently support OpenGL 4.0 in developer drivers, Release 256, brings full OpenGL 4.0 support to our unified consumer drivers. GeForce GTX 400 series customers can immediately take advantage of the tessellation support in OpenGL 4.0 by downloading Unigine’s latest release of their Heaven benchmark, version 2.1, which adds support for OpenGL 4.0 tessellation and 3D Vision technology.

Very cool, warrants probably a new thread on DX11 vs OpenGL for Tesselation and performance.

CUDA 3.1 – Release 256 drivers add support for applications built using CUDA Toolkit 3.1. CUDA Toolkit 3.1 enables a significant performance increase for double precision math operations.

What apps make use of DP? Encoding? Folding? Isn't this more Tesla related since Nv artificially limited DP performance on the GTX400's to keep them from undercutting Tesla performance?

EDIT: Also:

Adds support for a new ‘Quality’ mode for NVIDIA’s Ambient Occlusion control panel feature.

What's going on here? I think AO is one of those features that doesn't get enough attention, as it's much more of a game changer in terms of improved visual quality over something like PhysX effects (which only work in a handful of games). So a 'quality' setting entails what exactly? Higher resolution shadow maps to objects? Also warrants testing- I'd provide some results but I'm about 2000km away from my dekstop atm .

 

[Tempered81]

Jesus 96X AA? I bet it looks like 2X SSAA

 

[Keysplayr]

Very awesome, warrants a retest. Metro2033 Tesselation and Stalker COP results most interesting. Also, +19% with TrAA? I wonder if they kept the 'bug' with SSAA in DX10/11- where's BFG?

Quote from Chris Daniel:
"Yes the TRAA mode is fixed (performance gets a nice boost). But we also created a new tool for our AA enthusiast customers to be able to turn on up to 8x SG-SSAA. You can download the tool here":

http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=2624

 

[Sylvanas]

Quote from Chris Daniel:
"Yes the TRAA mode is fixed (performance gets a nice boost). But we also created a new tool for our AA enthusiast customers to be able to turn on up to 8x SG-SSAA. You can download the tool here":

http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=2624

Great, thanks Keys- will have to bookmark that for later. Initial results at Guru3d point to some sizable performance increases (although that forum is highly prone to placebo effect).

Edit: Some preliminary results from a chinese review site here.

 

[happy medium]

Great, thanks Keys- will have to bookmark that for later. Initial results at Guru3d point to some sizable performance increases (although that forum is highly prone to placebo effect).

Edit: Some preliminary results from a chinese review site here.

Nice results there. I cant wait to see the official drivers.

 

[Sylvanas]

PCGH tests the 257 driver

It also has a small interview with the Nvidia driver team about SGSSAA in this release.

Some PCGH readers might remember: A bug in the driver made it possible to use Sparse Grid Supersampling anti-aliasing on a Geforce GTX 480/470 under DirectX 10 and 11. This fact, which had once been discovered in the 3DCenter Forum, caught international attention due to our article. The positive feedback motivated Nvidia's software engineers to turn the bug into a feature. But they did even more: SGSSAA, with its superior quality, is now available in DirectX 9 and runs on older Geforce graphics cards, too. This development is a prime example for how much influence the community can have with a little support from the press.

This is pretty cool, well done Nvidia for listening to the community on this one- it was in their interest to do so anyway. The performance hit is massive so it's only really useful for people with older games, but hey it's better than not having the option at all.

Anyone else have some benches with the 257 driver?

 

[Borealis7]

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3303/nvidia_forceware_257_15_performance_analysis/index.html

TweakTown show small gains across the board.

 

[Hauk]

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3303/nvidia_forceware_257_15_performance_analysis/index.html

TweakTown show small gains across the board.

Some nice minimum frame gains in a few games w/470 SLI.

 

[happy medium]

The official drivers are supposed to come out with the release of the gtx 465 the 2nd of June.
Mabe they will give a little more boost?

I hope ATI has something special in there 10.6's ,they are falling behind.

Edit:

Quote:
"Geforce 257.15 Beta: Conclusion
Better performance, more features and according to multiple user reports no serious problems: The new Geforce 257.15 seems to be quite good. Since our tests were running without any problems, we can recommend installing the driver - due to the Beta status this is of course done at one's own risk. Some reviewers also reported improved 2D acceleration (GDI) and lowered frequencies in multi display setups - we didn't check those features though."


http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...uality-plus-Nvidia-interview/Practice/?page=2

 

[evolucion8]

The official drivers are supposed to come out with the release of the gtx 465 the 2nd of June.
Mabe they will give a little more boost?

I hope ATI has something special in there 10.6's ,they are falling behind.

Edit:

Quote:
"Geforce 257.15 Beta: Conclusion
Better performance, more features and according to multiple user reports no serious problems: The new Geforce 257.15 seems to be quite good. Since our tests were running without any problems, we can recommend installing the driver - due to the Beta status this is of course done at one's own risk. Some reviewers also reported improved 2D acceleration (GDI) and lowered frequencies in multi display setups - we didn't check those features though."

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...uality-plus-Nvidia-interview/Practice/?page=2

Falling behind on what? They driver is robust enough, they have the fastest card in the planet with a robust feature set, best multiple monitor support, best video processor for playback, best performance/price/power consumption envelope, they don't feel the urge to release emergency drivers to improve performance and distance themselves from the competition. I do think that ATi needs to improve their Crossfire drivers so we can choose profiles and diferent methods of multi GPU rendering, I would love to have that.

GTX 465 is severely handicapped as it is, it can't even outperform consistently the GTX 275, another failure like the HD 5830 in terms of performance.