Interim Nvidia 337.50 Driver update

Interim Nvidia 337.50 Driver update in relation to R9-295x2

As you guys have been able to notice, one day before the R9 295x2 launch Nvidia decided to bomb AMD a bit with a new driver. The new 337-50 Beta driver is significant and as such we wanted to add one page extra showing performance results in-between the Radeon R9 295x2 and GeForce GTX 780 Ti. The drivers enhance DirectX in such a manner that they free up CPU overhead. There are a lot of questions and I like to address some of them. First this, this driver is not going to do magic things for people with a more mainstream single GPU based graphics card. You need to really seek CPU limited situations. Old games that are CPU limited, few new games are CPU limited and lower resolutions are CPU limited. That is the golden rule here. 

So if you game with a GeForce GTX 760 at 1920x1080, then chances are slim you will see real performance increases. With two GTX 760 cards in SLI that could be different as multi-GPU setups often are very CPU bound.

This driver is very well suited for high-end SLI setups like the GeForce GTX 780 Ti. And it will be exactly that card setup that media will use in their benchmarks against that 295x2. The driver really works well, and hats off to Nvidia for tackling this problem so fast. Below some benchmarks, this is our standard test setup with GeForce GTX 780 Ti setup in SLI. The 'old' results show 335.23 WHQL results, and then in comparison 337.50 Beta.

Again I can not stress enough that the optimization really only shows in CPU bound situations, a VERY good example is Hitman which I have stated in the past is CPU bound heavily.  This setup with GTX 780 Ti in SLI is PERFECT for this driver, and since that is so relevant we wanted to add this page with some results (the driver was released 24 hours prior to the R9-295x2 launch. Also, you must wonder, what if AMD Mantle was never released, would Nvidia have released this driver at all ?