NVidia driver 337.50 beta released!

[Carfax83]

The vaunted "super driver" from NVidia has been released!

32 bit English only

64 bit English only

What’s New in Version 337.50

Performance
Introduces key DirectX optimizations which result in reduced game-loading times and significant performance increases across a wide variety of games. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration. Here are some examples of measured gains versus the previous 335.23 WHQL driver:

GeForce GTX 700 Series (Single GPU):

• Up to 64% in Total War: Rome II
• Up to 25% in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
• Up to 23% in Sleeping Dogs
• Up to 21% in Star Swarm
• Up to 15% in Batman: Arkham Origins
• Up to 10% in Metro: Last Light
• Up to 8% in Hitman Absolution
• Up to 7% in Sniper Elite V2
• Up to 6% in Tomb Raider
• Up to 6% in F1 2013

GeForce GTX 700 Series (SLI):

• Up to 71% in Total War: Rome II
• Up to 53% in Sniper Elite V2
• Up to 45% in Aliens vs. Predator
• Up to 31% in Sleeping Dogs
• Up to 20% in CoD: Black Ops 2
• Up to 10% in Hitman Absolution
• Up to 9% in F1 2013
• Up to 7% in Far Cry 3
• Up to 6% in Metro: Last Light
• Up to 6% in Batman: Arkham Origins

SLI Technology:

• Total War: Rome II – added profile
• War Thunder – added profile
• Watch Dogs – updated profile
• Diablo III – updated profile

3D Vision
Supports new “3D Compatibility Mode” for 3D Vision that enables us to improve the 3D experience for many key DirectX 10 and 11 games

3D Vision Profiles

• Path of Exile – rated “Good”
• KickBeat – rating now “Excellent”

3D Compatibility Mode Profiles

• Assassin’s Creed Liberation – previously “Not Recommended”, now rated as “Excellent”
• Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army – previously “Good”, now rated as “Excellent”
• Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army 2 – previously “Good”, now rated as “Excellent
• Strike Suit Zero – previously “Not Recommended”, now rated as “Good”
• Watchdogs – rated as “Good”

Additional Details:
Installs new PhysX System Software
Installs HD Audio
Installs GeForce Experience

Source

Isn't Skyrim DX9? Looks like that game will be getting a large performance increase as well with these drivers..

 

[tygeezy]

I wonder why bf4 wasn't on the list seeing as how much mantle has helped in online matches. Hopefully there will be a boost there and my poor old geforce 480 wasn't forgotten. I didn't see any mention of skyrim in the article, but elder scrolls online is dx 11, so one could assume that game would see a boost being that mmos tend to be cpu hungry.

64 % for total war is huge, but again that makes sense because rts games beat up on cpus.

Edit
Nevermind, I saw skyrim on the list, that is strange.

 

[BFG10K]

Sounds good, but I hope they're usable. The last two WHQL drivers are unusable for me because they routinely exhibit multi-second pauses in a variety of games. In MW3 for example the pauses are up to five seconds long.

As for Skyrim, I don't think the DX version matters. From what I understand they're targeting the driver code that handles the draw calls in a generic fashion, so in theory anything that's draw call limited should benefit to some degree.

 

[tygeezy]

Sounds good, but I hope they're usable. The last two WHQL drivers are unusable for me because they routinely exhibit multi-second pauses in a variety of games. In MW3 for example the pauses are up to five seconds long.

As for Skyrim, I don't think the DX version matters. From what I understand they're targeting the driver code that handles the draw calls in a generic fashion, so in theory anything that's draw call limited should benefit to some degree.

The article about this driver before only mentioned dx 11 titles. This would be great because there are a lot more dx 9 games that could use similar treatment.

As for your pauses did the sound stop with it too? What kind of gpu are you using? I get pauses with counter strike go, but only if it installed on any drive but the main windows install ssd. Odd I know, I made a post about it in comp help forum, but nobody responded to it.

 

[imaheadcase]

I'm not being paranoid here when I say that the same games are always on the list and never ones people play much am i? I swear i've seen Sniper Elite v2 on it many times before. Do these companies keep paying for optimizations or what...I mean Sniper Elite v2 was released in April 30, 2012..Even Skyrim is not really "new" anymore.

 

[BFG10K]

As for your pauses did the sound stop with it too? What kind of gpu are you using?

No, the sound keeps playing and the games continue running. When the display unfreezes it suddenly jumps to where it should be. Specs are in the sig.

I've tried everything including restoring the driver to default values; the only thing that works is rolling back to 332.21 WHQL, which functions perfectly.

 

[3DVagabond]

I'm not being paranoid here when I say that the same games are always on the list and never ones people play much am i? I swear i've seen Sniper Elite v2 on it many times before. Do these companies keep paying for optimizations or what...I mean Sniper Elite v2 was released in April 30, 2012..Even Skyrim is not really "new" anymore.

Agreed. :thumbsup:

I want to see someone come out with a driver that makes prices go down.

 

[5150Joker]

I'm not being paranoid here when I say that the same games are always on the list and never ones people play much am i? I swear i've seen Sniper Elite v2 on it many times before. Do these companies keep paying for optimizations or what...I mean Sniper Elite v2 was released in April 30, 2012..Even Skyrim is not really "new" anymore.

I'd like to see some ARMA III optimizations since my SLI Titans are vastly underused (50% max utilization) so I get [subpar] framerates. Don't care about Sniper Elite V2 or other games nobody plays. Seems the driver teams are only concentrating on popular benchmark titles...

Profanity isn't allowed in the technical forums.
-- stahlhart

 

[desprado]

I wonder why bf4 wasn't on the list seeing as how much mantle has helped in online matches. Hopefully there will be a boost there and my poor old geforce 480 wasn't forgotten. I didn't see any mention of skyrim in the article, but elder scrolls online is dx 11, so one could assume that game would see a boost being that mmos tend to be cpu hungry.

64 % for total war is huge, but again that makes sense because rts games beat up on cpus.

Edit
Nevermind, I saw skyrim on the list, that is strange.

elder scrolls online is horribly optimized game

 

[DarkKnightDude]

Not surprised it is up 64% in Rome 2, Rome 2 is not very optimized tbh on both camps compared with the previous Shogun 2. That's like instead of 10 fps its 16 fps.

 

[Ed1]

No, the sound keeps playing and the games continue running. When the display unfreezes it suddenly jumps to where it should be. Specs are in the sig.

I've tried everything including restoring the driver to default values; the only thing that works is rolling back to 332.21 WHQL, which functions perfectly.

I saw few reports of same things from others and they found it was caused by running Vsync and frame limiting caps , if you use fps limiting cap app maybe try turning it off (NV inspector, MSI AB, etc).

 

[Ed1]

I'd like to see some ARMA III optimizations since my SLI Titans are vastly underused (50% max utilization) so I get [subpar] framerates. Don't care about Sniper Elite V2 or other games nobody plays. Seems the driver teams are only concentrating on popular benchmark titles...

From what I understand these drivers are global optimized , not game specific optimized so it "should" boost most games that get into CPU bottlenecks , it should smooth fps my guess a bit .

Of course if a game is just badly coded ,drivers can't fix that .

 

[Muyoso]

So when they always list the improvements for the 700 series of cards, I assume that these same improvements apply to the 600 series of cards, but perhaps to a lesser extent?

 

[desprado]

From what I understand these drivers are global optimized , not game specific optimized so it "should" boost most games that get into CPU bottlenecks , it should smooth fps my guess a bit .

Of course if a game is just badly coded ,drivers can't fix that .

Yup best example is COD ghost which cannot be optimized

 

[Ed1]

So when they always list the improvements for the 700 series of cards, I assume that these same improvements apply to the 600 series of cards, but perhaps to a lesser extent?

Nvidia always does this but your 6xx should get same improvements, depending on model I guess it would scale .

We will see tomorrow, I am sure reviewers will have tests done .

 

[AdamK47]

I thought Rome 2 would never get an SLI profile.

 

[96Firebird]

I've been waiting for these... Going to try to do a comparison between the latest WHQL and these drivers in BF4, on both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. I've had Windows 8.1 sitting here waiting for these drivers, hopefully I get some encouraging results.

 

[Carfax83]

I've been waiting for these... Going to try to do a comparison between the latest WHQL and these drivers in BF4, on both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. I've had Windows 8.1 sitting here waiting for these drivers, hopefully I get some encouraging results.

I hope you do it, as I'd definitely like to see it

 

[tviceman]

I'll run a few benchmarks if anyone cares. I can do:

Metro Last Light
Batman AO
Tomb Raider
Hitman
Sleeping Dogs

 

[Grooveriding]

Sounds good, but I hope they're usable. The last two WHQL drivers are unusable for me because they routinely exhibit multi-second pauses in a variety of games. In MW3 for example the pauses are up to five seconds long.

As for Skyrim, I don't think the DX version matters. From what I understand they're targeting the driver code that handles the draw calls in a generic fashion, so in theory anything that's draw call limited should benefit to some degree.

I was wondering what the hell was going on as I've been getting those pauses as well. I've been playing online lately and thought it was some sort of lag or problem with my router. I didn't think it could of been a driver issue.

I switched back to the old nvidia drivers and this went away for me. Hopefully these new ones have it fixed.

 

[taserbro]

elder scrolls online is horribly optimized game

Eso runs at a perfectly playable fps on my gtx 460 i5 2500k computer even when there were more than 100 players filling my screen during a castle siege.

It's got a very short draw distance, sometimes is downright ugly and uses some pretty archaic rendering methods all around but saying that it's not well optimized just because it doesn't fill the gpu usage bar to full is silly. It's the only mmo where massive-scale pvp battles are playable to me.

 

[bystander36]

GeForce GTX 700 Series (Single GPU):

• Up to 64% in Total War: Rome II
• Up to 25% in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
• Up to 23% in Sleeping Dogs
• Up to 21% in Star Swarm
• Up to 15% in Batman: Arkham Origins
• Up to 10% in Metro: Last Light
• Up to 8% in Hitman Absolution
• Up to 7% in Sniper Elite V2
• Up to 6% in Tomb Raider
• Up to 6% in F1 2013

GeForce GTX 700 Series (SLI):

• Up to 71% in Total War: Rome II
• Up to 53% in Sniper Elite V2
• Up to 45% in Aliens vs. Predator
• Up to 31% in Sleeping Dogs
• Up to 20% in CoD: Black Ops 2
• Up to 10% in Hitman Absolution
• Up to 9% in F1 2013
• Up to 7% in Far Cry 3
• Up to 6% in Metro: Last Light
• Up to 6% in Batman: Arkham Origins

Some of those don't make a lot of sense. I would think that games that were improved with a single, would see bigger improvements in SLI. I guess these improvements are all about CPU overhead, or SLI would always see a bigger improvement from the driver than a single GPU.

 

[BFG10K]

Anyone want to try them? http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/74735

I personally stay away from nVidia beta drivers, having been burned several times in the past.

 

[Gloomy]

Can someone run star swarm in RTS mode, with "export frame data" ticked, then upload the CSV somewhere?

danke

 

[Atreidin]

There's some serious qualifying phrases in those notes, "up to" and "GTX 700 series", so I am interested in seeing which cards benefit the most, and under what scenarios.