Tuesday, June 15th 2010

NVIDIA Releases GeForce 257.21 WHQL Driver Suite
NVIDIA today released GeForce 257.21 WHQL driver suite for GeForce series graphics cards and NVIDIA ION platforms, this is the first WHQL-signed driver in its 256 series of drivers, which archives two main goals as far as driver packaging goes: unifying desktop and mobile GeForce drivers; and unifying GeForce 400 series drivers with that which supports GeForce 6 thru GeForce 300 series into one package (NVIDIA initially had a separate package for GeForce 400 series). GeForce 257.21 also packs a boatload of changes, including a large number of game-specific performance increments, new technologies, updates key extra components, and fixes bugs.
DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 257.21 WHQL for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit
A complete list of changes follows.
DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 257.21 WHQL for Windows 7/Vista 64-bit, Windows 7/Vista 32-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit
A complete list of changes follows.
- Adds support for Blu-ray 3D with NVIDIA 3D Vision technology. Learn more about the hardware and software requirements here .
- Increases performance for GeForce GTX 400 Series GPUs in several PC games. The following are examples of some of the most significant improvements measured with GeForce GTX 480. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration:
o Up to 14% in Aliens vs. Predator (1920x1200 noAA/AF - Tessellation on)
o Up to 4% in Batman: Arkham Asylum (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF PhysX=High)
o Up to 5% in BattleForge (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF - Very High settings)
o Up to 5% in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF)
o Up to 4% in Crysis: Warhead (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF - Enthusiast setting)
o Up to 24% in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (1920x1200 no AA/AF)
o Up to 9% in Far Cry 2 (2560x1600 8xAA/16xAF)
o Up to 25% in Just Cause 2 (2560x1600 no AA/AF - Concrete Jungle)
o Up to 7% in Metro 2033 (1920x1200 no AA/16xAF - Tessellation on)
o Up to 40% in Metro 2033 with SLI ((1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF - Tessellation on)
o Up to 8% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (1920x1200 no AA/AF - Day)
o Up to 110% in Stone Giant with SLI (2650x1600 - Tessellation on, DoF on)
o Up to 6% in The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena (2560x1600 no AA/AF)
o Up to 9% in Unigine: Tropics (2560x1600 no AA/AF - OpenGL)
o Up to 5% in 3DMark Vantage (Performance and Extreme Presets)
o Up to 19% with Transparency AA (1920x1200 4xTrSS - measured in Crysis) - Upgrades PhysX System Software to version 9.10.0223.
- Adds support for OpenGL 4.0 for GeForce GTX 400 Series GPUs.
- Adds support for CUDA Toolkit 3.1 which includes significant performance increases for double precision math operations. See CUDA Zone for more details.
- Adds support for new extreme Antialiasing modes for 3-way SLI PCs, including up to SLI48x AA for GeForce 200 series GPUs and up to SLI96x AA for GeForce GTX 400 series GPUs.
- Adds support for a new 'Quality' mode for NVIDIA's Ambient Occlusion control panel feature.
- Adds a new NVIDIA Control Panel setup page for SLI and PhysX for ultimate control over multi-gpu configurations.
- Adds a new NVIDIA Control Panel feature for ultimate control over CUDA GPUs, allowing the user to effectively choose which GPU will power each CUDA application.
- 3D Vision customers can download the v257.21 3D Vision drivers here.
- Includes numerous bug fixes. Refer to the release notes on the documentation tab for information about the key bug fixes in this release.
62 Comments on NVIDIA Releases GeForce 257.21 WHQL Driver Suite
www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_470/30.html
Now that is with fairly mature drivers for the HD 5870 and pretty new drivers for the GTX 470, so what we should be asking ourselves is simple really....... over a driver development period of say 6 months, can at least a 9% performance improvement be found through drivers alone, the answer to that is yes, we see it most of the time and on those odd rare occasions 15% plus (ATi's 2900XT back in 2007, NVidia's G92 8800GTS hit about 13% I think).
All thats left to determine is though, will ATi get significantly more performance from their drivers over the next couple of releases, if they do, the 470 may still lag behind a little, if they don't.... it may be close.
www.techspot.com/review/283-geforce-gtx-400-vs-radeon-hd-5800/
Regarding drivers, as you can see by Nvidia's latest release there is no real performance increase noticeable to fermi owners, benches around the web show basically no difference, Nvidia's performance figures have always been dodgy, when they say up to 25% increase in a game it could mean at one certain point not an overall increase. Nividia drivers for fermi are already very mature, what do you think they were doing the 7 months fermi was delayed??
Here is a more mature review from hardwarecanuks showing GTX470 completely annihilating HD5850 thanks to the new driver :
www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/33190-gpu-benchmarking-methods-investigated-fact-vs-fiction-3.html Why wrong ? that is the beta driver of the same version ..
Fuck the fanboys everywhere and in every way possible!!!!!! haha
if nvidia actually fixed the bug without changing anything else it would be the best thing to happen
And even if that is true , their latest review is topnotch , in fact it is one of the best ever.
rapidshare.com/files/399675797/257.15_desktop_winxp_64bit_english_beta.exe
I got it on 27th of May. You can compare that to the newest ones on Nvidia's site.