Just did a few tests with these going from 258.96 WHQL to 260.63 BETA.
Unfortunatly I don't have Starcraft 2 or Bad Company 2 which is where many of the improvements seem to be, but I quickly tested Mafia 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, Crysis and Farcry 2.
All tests are done at 1680x1050, all settings maxed, highest quality settings in the nVidia control panel and 8x AA where possible. Tested on a GTX470 @ Stock with a Q9550. Where PhysX was used this was offloaded onto a GTX260 clocked to GTX285 performance.
Test were run 3 times each with the best of each picked.
The top part of each graph shows the amount of framerate variation - patches of white would indicate a problem with rendering performance.
The bottom part of the graph shows the smoothed average framerate in green, the dark grey gives an indication of variation to the "shown" framerate.
The measurement of "stutter" is fairly arbitrary and can only directly be compared between runs of the same benchmark on the same settings. As a general rule however anything under 5-6 is very smooth, anything under 20 is acceptable, with percieved framerates close to the indicated framerate, above 20 the game is likely to be noticeably jerky when played.
First up S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat as this one shows the biggest difference.
258.96
260.63
Showing an approx. 11% performance increase overall and much smoother rendering performance - tho both are well within normal limits for smooth gameplay.
Mafia 2
258.96
260.63
As you can see
something has changed although overall performance is about the same. My general impression here is they have smoothed out performance in areas with small to medium amounts of stutter compared to the previous drivers but areas with poor performance previously seem marginally worse - my assumption here is its a work in progress and the final 260 drivers will see smoother performance overall.
Both runs show quite a high level of stuttering generally which seems symptomatic of games with PhysX.
Crysis
258.96
260.63
Nothing much changed here - however despite retesting the rendering "smoothness" is worse by quite a margin on the 260 drivers - possibly another sign of WIP - both runs however are well within the limits for normal gameplay and the stuttering is contained in the first pass of the run which is never smooth on any hardware. Performance for passes 2 and 3 are pretty much identical.
Farcry 2
258.96
260.63
Pretty much unchanged here 5 of the runs were all fairly much the same within a small margin of error with one test on the 258 drivers putting up slightly better performance.
, need me a widescreen screen lol
