nVidia has come under fire one time too many lately, mainly because of their poor driver performance in many AAA game titles, the most notable being Tomb Raider. As it stands today, most of Tomb Raider’s major issues have been fixed, but the game is still graphically buggy and is prone to random crashes on GeForce cards. On the other hand, AMD’s Radeon series seem to run the game pretty flawlessly without any issues.
nVidia PR agents and tech support have been constantly reinstating their effort to make the drivers more robust, because AMD Radeon has picked up on some of nVidia GeForce’s market share, owing to poor driver performance. Its funny to observe how trends shift. Where about four years back GeForce seemed to doing just fine on the driver end and Radeon had the driver bug.
nVidia rolled out a new set of beta drivers that is claimed to boost performance by 20% in numerous titles, including the new ‘just released’ titles: Dead Island: Riptide, Star Trek and Neverwinter. The GeForce 320.00 beta drivers were uploaded on nVidia’s website day before yesterday and are also available for download through the GeForce Experience.
Measured with GeForce GTX 660, nVidia claims the following performance increases:
- Up to 20% in Dirt: Showdown
- Up to 18% in Tomb Raider
- Up to 8% in StarCraft II
- Up to 6% in other top games like Far Cry 3
We tested the 320.00 Beta drivers on Tomb Raider, StarCraft II and Far Cry 3. Here are our results:
It is evident that the 320.00 Beta GeForce drivers have had a positive impact on performance. In Tomb Raider, there is not just an FPS increase, the game all over feels more stable and robust, its a good sign.
We’d recommended you to update to this beta right away if you just can’t wait, but the stable version will out anytime soon (possibly by the 1st of May) and that is when you would want to download it.
