Nvidia WHQL Drivers Due in afew days!

[Danik]

On a side note, it is not at all unusual for MMOs to dip below 60 fps in heavily populated areas even on the most high end systems. Usually in cities and such - such areas are usually processor bound and the GPU doesn't help much in very densely populated areas. Even in WoW, I can dip to 30 fps at ultra settings, 1600p, in orgrimmar in front of the auction house when hundreds of players are around me. I played on the illidan realm which is probably the most populated realm in the US.

I really enjoy Guild Wars 2, although it does seem more like a conventional MMO than I would like. I feel like MMOs need to be shaken up - developers need to think out of the box! I'm sick of WoW clones. It has some good ideas, is very well polished, but it does stick to a lot of conventional ideas as well.

I would hardly call it a conventional game. Dynamic Events and the Heart system are more fluid than the standard talk to someone and retrieve or kill something. The jumping puzzles make for some interesting events. Have you found the vista in Lion's Arch where you follow the dead pirate captain? I haven't seen anything like that in an MMO before. The World vs World system may be large scale PvP, but with a bit added to it like supply lines.

 

[Danik]

It's a slow paced MMO, please explain why it's absolutely necessary to have 60 fps minimum in an MMO and why 49-50 fps is insufficient? GTX670/7970 are already getting 70 fps in this game. That's a joke for modern graphics cards on a single 1080P screen. Tom's already showed that the game is mostly CPU limited with a $400 GPU+ until you get into 1600P resolution. When 1 GPU gets 72 fps and another 76 fps, it's mostly meaningless. OTOH, when one GPU gets you 31 fps min and 47 fps average and the other gets you 37 fps min and 57 fps average, that's a huge difference. GW2 is not one of those games that requires a $500 GPU upgrade. Games like Sleeping Dogs, Metro 2033 or BF3 though actually do need a fast GPU.

GW2 loves a fast CPU:

[image removed]

With your CPU @ 4.7ghz you'll get 60 fps minimums on any of the 670/7970/680 cards ==> basically no difference in playability.




Skyrim + ENB mods 8xMSAA or Batman AC + 8xMSAA and there is an evident memory bandwidth bottleneck on the 680. It's clear as mud on the 660Ti even. You don't play those games?

I haven't seen the same results with my GTX 670, which boosts to the low 1200's on the core. I can only imagine that it may be due to my CPU, which is an i5 2500 that can only overclock to 3.8 Ghz on all cores since it is a non k. I personally think this chart is deceiving. A majority of the time I get 60 fps with vsync on, however, with large crowds, capital cities, and world vs world battles this can drop to 30 to 40. At that level it is not so smooth.

The minimum fps is far more important for a game like this because certain activities that are not necessarily rare can bring the number down drastically. As far as I'm concerned, large dynamic events and WvW battles are the key points of this game and those can be frame rate killers.

 

[Rvenger]

Seems Nvidia has been listening to us performance Enhancing Drivers are due very soon.

Source ---> http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=4396007&postcount=14

I don't know why you are so persistant in getting performance enhancing drivers on a GPU that already has great performance. Its not like its going to be an substantial increase.


EDIT: These drivers are bug fixes for certain titles, not performance enhancing drivers lol.

 

[hokies83]

I don't know why you are so persistant in getting performance enhancing drivers on a GPU that already has great performance. Its not like its going to be an substantial increase.


EDIT: These drivers are bug fixes for certain titles, not performance enhancing drivers lol.

Performance enhanceing drivers for new games.. New SLIP performance jumps..

Bug Fixes Better GPU optimization

Like your 7970s have got 2 last driver releases it is our turn.

 

[Rvenger]

Like your 7970s have got 2 last driver releases it is our turn.

There is a big difference between the 79XX series driver issues and GF 600 series. Nvidia has an excellent driver team vs AMD whose driver team seemed to be nonexistent up until mid July. My 680 and 670s ran perfect on every game where as my 7970 would crash on sleep state, BF3 performance was 560ti performance at best and 2d desktop performance was mediocre at best. Nvidia has excellent SLI performance, most games run flawless with excellent performance so I don't see why Nvidia would need some kind of miracle driver. Who cares if one card gets 5 fps faster than the other. I would take a small hit in performance for smoothness and stability any day.

 

[ilogik]

I bought the EVGA GeForce GTX680 SuperClocked a week ago to replace a 2 year old card. By the sound of this thread is it something I should return in exchange for a different card?

 

[hokies83]

I bought the EVGA GeForce GTX680 SuperClocked a week ago to replace a 2 year old card. By the sound of this thread is it something I should return in exchange for a different card?

No... This forum is kinda Pro AMD...

I get 145fps and 1700mb Vram use in Skyrim at 2560x1440 with high textures maxxed out.. and that is massively higher then those benchmarks show..

So i put no faith in 3rd party benchmarks..

680 is a great card.. and will be a bit faster in afew days.

 

[ZimZum]

I bought the EVGA GeForce GTX680 SuperClocked a week ago to replace a 2 year old card. By the sound of this thread is it something I should return in exchange for a different card?

At this point the 680 doesnt make much sense. The 670 basically offers the same perfromance for lesss money. Same thing with the 7970.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

There is a big difference between the 79XX series driver issues and GF 600 series. Nvidia has an excellent driver team vs AMD whose driver team seemed to be nonexistent up until mid July. My 680 and 670s ran perfect on every game where as my 7970 would crash on sleep state, BF3 performance was 560ti performance at best and 2d desktop performance was mediocre at best. Nvidia has excellent SLI performance, most games run flawless with excellent performance so I don't see why Nvidia would need some kind of miracle driver. Who cares if one card gets 5 fps faster than the other. I would take a small hit in performance for smoothness and stability any day.

Seriously? It's obvious you have no actual experience with AMD graphics cards. Why do people insist on perpetuating this RUMOR that AMD drivers are terrible. For the last 3 years my 5870 ran with ZERO problems for me. Saying that AMD didn't have a driver team up until July is just nonsense of the worst kind, and serves the purpose of keeping that stereotype about AMD alive.

Before I knew price/performance was an actual thing I had only bought Nvidia cards. Six of them total up until the time the 5870 came out and I actually starting reading hardware reviews. It's price/performance was far better than the nvidia offerings of the time, and I took a gamble going against all the people saying "ATi drivers are horrible." You know what? I had no issues that couldn't be solved with quick google search. Same as any problem I had on my Nvidia cards. Both sides have problems, both have pretty excellent driver support when you consider the vast amounts of pc hardware with driver issues on the market. So, STOP SPREADING THIS NONSENSE.

 

[Olikan]

wouldn't the WHQL driver be based on the last beta driver?

...if it's based on 306.xxx....it's going to increase 5% in some games ¬¬

 

[cmdrdredd]

Seriously? It's obvious you have no actual experience with AMD graphics cards. Why do people insist on perpetuating this RUMOR that AMD drivers are terrible. For the last 3 years my 5870 ran with ZERO problems for me. Saying that AMD didn't have a driver team up until July is just nonsense of the worst kind, and serves the purpose of keeping that stereotype about AMD alive.

Before I knew price/performance was an actual thing I had only bought Nvidia cards. Six of them total up until the time the 5870 came out and I actually starting reading hardware reviews. It's price/performance was far better than the nvidia offerings of the time, and I took a gamble going against all the people saying "ATi drivers are horrible." You know what? I had no issues that couldn't be solved with quick google search. Same as any problem I had on my Nvidia cards. Both sides have problems, both have pretty excellent driver support when you consider the vast amounts of pc hardware with driver issues on the market. So, STOP SPREADING THIS NONSENSE.

You haven't been following things then. The 7000 series was horrible due to drivers until July. Performance was terrible in all the major games. It took them a long time to catch up.

Of course your 2 generations old card would run fine...

 

[tweakboy]

Lets cheer them on.

 

[Danik]

wouldn't the WHQL driver be based on the last beta driver?

...if it's based on 306.xxx....it's going to increase 5% in some games ¬¬

I agree. I don't anticipate seeing much from it. Maybe an increase in the performance of some new games like GW2, but nothing spectatcular.

 

[blastingcap]

The 7000 series was horrible due to drivers until July. Performance was terrible in all the major games. It took them a long time to catch up.

You mean like NV having broken SLI for Civ V, or broken 6xx performance in Shogun 2 until their later drivers, etc.? Come on now. NV *are* better than AMD's for multi-GPU, if only by a little, but for single-GPU they are basically tied.

 

[ViRGE]

You mean like NV having broken SLI for Civ V, or broken 6xx performance in Shogun 2 until their later drivers, etc.? Come on now. NV *are* better than AMD's for multi-GPU, if only by a little, but for single-GPU they are basically tied.

To be clear, in the case of Shogun 2 that wasn't NVIDIA's doing. That was something The Creative Assembly did in a patch.

 

[Lonbjerg]

I cannot remember the last time I used a WHQL driver...the "WHQL" part is useless...pure PR.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

You haven't been following things then. The 7000 series was horrible due to drivers until July. Performance was terrible in all the major games. It took them a long time to catch up.

Of course your 2 generations old card would run fine...

I've had a 7970 since launch. I had no problems running games whatsoever. I may have had fewer FPS in BF3, but I was still getting around 80-90 fps in MP at 1080p.

I'm telling you. The drivers are fine.

 

[Kaldari]

Sweet. I'll take any boost I can get in GW2. I can run everything maxed except for LOD and shadows, which have to be at High instead of Ultra. So I can pretty much see all the eye candy, but of course totally maxed is always best. ^_^

 

[cmdrdredd]

I've had a 7970 since launch. I had no problems running games whatsoever. I may have had fewer FPS in BF3, but I was still getting around 80-90 fps in MP at 1080p.

I'm telling you. The drivers are fine.

Go back and look at the gtx 670 launch reviews. Performance was down in skyrim, battlefield 3, Batman and others. Compare that to current benches with newer drivers. See the increase in performance just from driver revisions? Just because it runs doesn't mean there isn't a problem. That thinking is false.

 

[Rvenger]

Seriously? It's obvious you have no actual experience with AMD graphics cards. Why do people insist on perpetuating this RUMOR that AMD drivers are terrible. For the last 3 years my 5870 ran with ZERO problems for me.
So, STOP SPREADING THIS NONSENSE.

Um, I am talking about the 7000 series cards from release until now. I am not talking about 2 years ago You must have been lucky with your 7970 but as you know with different hardware will yield different experiences. The majority won't agree with you.

To date I have owned:

2x GTX 680
3x GTX 670

3x 7970

And now I currently have a 7950. I can honestly say things are much better than the old drivers but the older 12.4 drivers and below were absolutely horrid for performance and stability with the 7xxx series cards. Zerocore would freeze the system everytime the monitor shut off, I had driver crashes web browsing, BF3 performance was worse than my old GTX 560, and I could probably go on.

 

[Rvenger]

I'm telling you. The drivers are fine.

You are not everyone else.




This is an nvidia discussion so lets get back on track.

 

[Termie]

snip

To date I have owned:

2x GTX 680
3x GTX 670

3x 7970

And now I currently have a 7950. I can honestly say things are much better than the old drivers but the older 12.4 drivers and below were absolutely horrid for performance and stability with the 7xxx series cards. Zerocore would freeze the system everytime the monitor shut off, I had driver crashes web browsing, BF3 performance was worse than my old GTX 560, and I could probably go on.

So why did you sell off all those sweet nVidia cards to switch to AMD anyway?!?

By the way, here's an article on the new 306.02 WHQL drivers: http://www.techspot.com/news/49955-...rs-offer-gtx-660-ti-support-new-profiles.html

Doesn't look like a performance release, other than improvements already included in the July drivers.

 

[Rvenger]

So why did you sell off all those sweet nVidia cards to switch to AMD anyway?!?

By the way, here's an article on the new 306.02 WHQL drivers: http://www.techspot.com/news/49955-...rs-offer-gtx-660-ti-support-new-profiles.html

Doesn't look like a performance release, other than improvements already included in the July drivers.

Videocarditis. Plus the wife forced me to stop my spending. :sneaky:

 

[yours truly]

Those few days were almost a few weeks. They're finally here:

http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/win8-win7-winvista-64bit-306.23-whql-driver-uk.html

 

[hokies83]

yay it's here! http://www.nvidia.com/object/win8-win7-winvista-64bit-306.23-whql-driver.html