Lower Forceware 334.89 performance !?

[Gripen90]

I decided to update my good old Forceware 320.49 drivers from back in july 2013 to something more contemporary. So tonight I downloaded and installed the 334.89 drivers.
I first uninstalled 320.49 manually and installed 334.89 (Express installation) afterwards.

However I'm a bit dissapointed with the performance of these drivers !.
3Dmark11 & FireStrike scores dropped and so did my average FPS on Unigine Valley 1.0 and Heaven 4.0.

FireStrike dropped from 17'500 to 17'000. 3Dm11 from 23'000 to 22'700. I can see it's the Graphics score that's low when I compare to earlier results.
Valley 1.0 and Heaven 4.0 have both dropped 3 FPS in both 1080P and 1440P benching.

I have checked with MSI Afterburner Beta 3.18 and my cards are not throttling - they run max speed all the way

Anyone who has experienced the same performance drop when benchmarking ?

I haven't had crashes in games so far (knocking on wood, but it annoys me a bit that I have to OC now to get the same results as before but at stock speeds

 

[Gripen90]

Bench some games, that’s the business end at the end of the day.

Yea but it's no fun when you also like to bench every now and then.

 

[Gripen90]

So epeen is more important to you than how your games run? bak @ U

No it has nothing to do with that ? why now talk about epeen ? We have threads with 3Dmark scores etc and it's really no fun not being able to get results you had previously with old drivers. I think both Kapstaad, gregster etc can confirm that.

I play games - right now MW3 was messed up because of the driver and I then had to run the game cache file integrity again via steam.

 

[Gripen90]

Just curious, are the cards holding the exact same high clocks as the previous drivers?

Yep they are - that's why I don't get it. Something must have changed with algorithms or so.

 

[Gripen90]

I think nVidia made some changes to the TDP threshold or so.
In MSI Afterburner If I set temperature target to 85°c and power limit to 106% and change nothing else I get almost the same scores as with the 320.49 drivers when I didn't touch a thing in MSI Afterburner.
It's just strange because the cards still run at the same MHz and temperatures during the entire tests. I tried uninstalling them again and run the clean install in the nVidia driver - still the same results :/
We'll I'm gonna keep them installed anyhow and wait till newer drivers become available again before I benchmark.

 

[Gripen90]

Go back to the old drivers for benching then? Use the latest for games. Also, why on earth did you manually uninstall everything first then do an express install? In future, just run the driver, click custom install, the check the clean installation box and the driver will remove it's old files from system folders for you...

Just some times it hasn't worked well. That's why I do the hassle of manual uninstall.
I'm keeping this driver until nvidia releases a new and then I'll stop benching for a while and just play.

 

[Gripen90]

Each update brings slightly better performance to certain game's and other certain adjustments as well.

There could be other reasons why your getting lower performance as well.

Njarh it's the drivers. I tried the 320.49 again and got my "old results" again. I then reinstalled the 334.89 via the nvidia clean install option and the scores a lower again. There's something in the drivers. However - it may just be placebo effect but it feels like my MW2, MW3 and Black Ops II run a bit smoother now and not such much stutter... can't confirm though since I haven't checked before/after results with FCAT.