Nvidia today released their new 337.50 Beta driver. 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. More after the break.

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.

Now it is with good reason that Nvidia launched this driver today, as very soon the competition will launch their new multi-GPU based R9 295x2. Basically this driver is GOLDEN 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 optimizations 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. If you'd measure with a single GTX 760, the results would be minimal.

Anyway, above are the quick results with SLI, settings are stringent as per usual and are in line with how we typically benchmark. Interestingly enough, this optimization could also really work well with some slower AMD processors versus powerful graphics cards.