Today we are going to take a look at the “top dog” in the marketplace, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580, along with the three latest drivers, the 266.58 WHQL, 263.09 WHQL, and 262.99 WHQL. Our goal is to see what performance difference and improvements are available in each driver set, if any. We hope that by the end of this we will have provided you with enough information to choose the best driver available. We will be testing the majority of games/programs listed in the 266.58 release notes and see how they perform, plus a few extra games and synthetic benchmarks to see if the drivers have any effect on them as well. Read on to see how each driver set performs on the GTX 580.
Test System:
- CPU: Intel Core i7 920 @ 4Ghz
- Motherboard: ASUS Rampage III Extreme
- RAM: Mushkin Blackline 3×2GB DDR3
- Video Card: ASUS GTX580 (Drivers: 266.58 WHQL, 263.09 WHQL, 262.99 WHQL)
- Power Supply: Antec TPQ 1200W
- Storage: Western Digital black 500GB
- OS: Windows 7 64bit
Release Notes for 266.58 WHQL Drivers:
Supports the newly released GeForce GTX 580 and GeForce GTX 570 GPUs.
Increases performance for GeForce 400 Series and 500 Series GPUs in several PC games vs. the latest Release 260 drivers. The following are examples of some of the most significant improvements measured on Windows 7. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration:
GeForce GTX 580:
Up to 7% in Battlefield Bad Company 2 (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
Up to 12% in Battleforge (SLI 1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF Very High)
Up to 11% in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (SLI 1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
Up to 7% in Dirt 2 (SLI 1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
Up to 7% in Far Cry 2 (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
Up to 5% in Just Cause 2 (1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF Dark Tower)
Up to 5% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (SLI – 1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
Up to 9% in Stone Giant (SLI 1920×1200, DOF on)
Up to 8% in Unigine Heaven v2.1 (SLI 1920×1200 4xAA/16xAF)
10 Comments
[...] Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 @ Tech Reaction [...]
[...] a resolution barely anyone plays at. Edit: Here is a driver comparison for the new Nvidia drivers http://www.techreaction.net/2011/02/…2-99-compared/ so maybe with latest drivers things have changed. __________________ NVIDIA GeForce GTX 500 [...]
The plots are indeed terrible.
The bars are too far apart resulting in poor contrast between the different data.
The 3D effect compounds this since there is no clear terminus to the bars, exasperated further by all the green and use of gradients. High contrast colours work best, and if I had my way simple black and white.
Since the difference between the different drivers is of order of a few percent it is very hard to see any difference when the total frame rate is plotted. A relative difference would have shown the difference much better since all of the vertical axis would be used to show the difference instead of a tiny bit of it.
On another point nobody ever seems to plot histograms when showing frame rate.
The average can be misleading if the distributions have long tails due to a momentary FPS drop due to some short but heavy section in a benchmark. Many site are not showing max and min values but a distribution would be nice.
@Speed,
Thanks for the 15 y/o rant. Now can you use your big boy words and actually give reasons? We can not fix/update our charts with amazing responses like you have supplied us. We are always open to change if it will help out readers.
[...] if you want FPS improvements … you can look here for a diver comparison … the new drivers seem to be the best lately performance wise. __________________ Member of [...]
[...] found this … Driver comparison of the the 266.58 WHQL, 263.09 WHQL, and 262.99 WHQL. __________________ Member of the OCN [...]
[...] story at TechReaction Posted in: Affiliate [...]
You suck at making graphs. My 2 cents.
[...] By The Duke on February 7, 2011 [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by TechREACTION.net, Denis Hildebrand. Denis Hildebrand said: #TechREACTION [Driver Comparison] Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 – 266.58, 263.09, 262.99 Compared: Today we are going t… http://bit.ly/hazndO [...]