We’ve recently dealt with the benefits that AMD Catalyst drivers offer through regular updates. The test was done on Radeon HD 6870. Our conclusion was that, even though this model seems to be the most frequently mentioned one in the release notes, practical gains don’t usually match theoretical ones. The performance difference turned out to be minor in favour of newer revisions in real-world conditions. We haven’t been planning on letting NVIDIA slip past, though, so here’s the second part to the story. As was the case with AMD, we’ve been looking for a model that’s been present on the market for a while already, while still selling in high quantities.
The choice has come down to GeForce GTX 570 with 1280 MB of memory, as the card has been present on the market long enough; newer models don’t work with older driver revisions, and we wanted to begin the test with a revision in the 260 family (the oldest revision to work with GeForce GTX 570 is 266.58). The latest ForceWare driver at present is 275.33, and we’ve also taken up an interim version randomly.
As before, the idea is simple - test all the various driver revisions within strictly set conditions imposed by titles from our usual test battery. We’ve used the resolution that this card is most likely to encounter in 90% of the cases, in entirely real-world situations and with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering turned off.
