News - NVIDIA announces 304.18 Beta Drivers, offers 18 per cent boost

[HEXUS]

Perhaps passively saying "F**k you" to Linus, as Windows performance improves.

Read more.

[kalniel]

For Diablo III gamers, NVIDIA has made it possible to enable MSAA, improving jaggies and removing the game's default post-process blur, better representing original textures.

That is handy.. and quite impressive as I thought D3 used a deferred renderer. Hope AMD figure out something similar.

[Primey0]

I wish AMDs drivers increased performance

[crossy]

I wonder if this new driver would make any difference to my Windows Experience score - I happened to check and my "Aero desktop" score is VERY low (six-core+GF460OC being lower than a single-core PC with 8800GTX).

Oh, and I don't think this is an FU to Linus - if anything it's going to support his opinions (slightly!).

[dangel]

I can't use the new series of drives on my 580 because as soon as I do Skyrim turns into a slideshow. Rather hoping that gets fixed because I like the idea of adaptive vsynch etc.

[Terbinator]

Hopefully this means I can nuke the DarkD3 dll now.

[kingpotnoodle]

I can't use the new series of drives on my 580 because as soon as I do Skyrim turns into a slideshow. Rather hoping that gets fixed because I like the idea of adaptive vsynch etc.

Worked mostly fine on my 570 before I switched to a 670, have you done a clean install?

I have noticed an odd Skyrim bug where sometimes there is very poor framerate etc that is solved with a system restart, still seems to occur with the latest beta patches etc but is rare enough and easily solved.

[Roobubba]

I wonder if this new driver would make any difference to my Windows Experience score - I happened to check and my "Aero desktop" score is VERY low (six-core+GF460OC being lower than a single-core PC with 8800GTX).

The overall Windows Experience score reported is the lowest number only from its set of tests. You could have a supercomputer, but if you're running it on a 5400rpm HDD at 95% capacity, you will have an atrocious Windows Experience score! Expand out the tab to find out what Windows thinks is your system's weakest link.

I personally find it a very poor indicator of system performance. Take, for example, a laptop on which you have no plans to do any gaming, and hence no discrete graphics card - it could have an awesome processor, plenty of fast, low latency RAM and an SSD, but windows will say 'oh but your graphics card is rubbish therefore your system only scores 1.0.'

[dangel]

Worked mostly fine on my 570 before I switched to a 670, have you done a clean install?

I have noticed an odd Skyrim bug where sometimes there is very poor framerate etc that is solved with a system restart, still seems to occur with the latest beta patches etc but is rare enough and easily solved.

Yeah I did try a clean install - might try it with a reboot thanks for the tip.

[Lee H]

I wonder if they've fixed the bug where the nvidia 3D vision technology reverted back to "3D vision discover" mode each time you reboot.

[Terbinator]

Well Diablo III still looks as crud as ever.

[crossy]

The overall Windows Experience score reported is the lowest number only from its set of tests. You could have a supercomputer, but if you're running it on a 5400rpm HDD at 95% capacity, you will have an atrocious Windows Experience score! Expand out the tab to find out what Windows thinks is your system's weakest link.

Erm, I did say that it was the "Aero Desktop" score that was low - so yes, I've already expanded that tab.

I personally find it a very poor indicator of system performance. Take, for example, a laptop on which you have no plans to do any gaming, and hence no discrete graphics card - it could have an awesome processor, plenty of fast, low latency RAM and an SSD, but windows will say 'oh but your graphics card is rubbish therefore your system only scores 1.0.'

True, that's what tipped me off - ancient single core AMD+8800GTX gets more than my six-core+GF460 combo. The "problem" is due to that very low (3.8!!) "Graphics: Desktop performance for Windows Aero". Now although I'm sure that the 8800GTX was a damned good card in it's time, my assumption was that the newer GF460 should be better. What's slightly concerning is that, while I know WI isn't the best b/mark tool, it's a bit worrying that it might be reporting a genuine issue that'll be effecting my gaming etc.

Maybe this is a question better posted in the main forums rather than cluttering up this news item ...

[TJM DW]

Nvidia's simultaneous driver updates for Linux generally improve performance every so often as well - it's nothing special for Windows and occurs for OSX and other more minor platforms too.

The people in Nvidia Linux driver development team are perfectly dedicated to the platform and actually create a pretty decent (albeit proprietary) driver. What Linus has a problem with is their management and legal teams - they refuse to provide any support or documentation to the Nouveau project (which I am involved in) who are attempting to create a proper open source driver for Nvidia GPUs for Linux. Due to this lack of assistance, it's a fraction of the speed and usually less stable, but does include some features the Nvidia driver doesn't (along with missing a tonne).

Nouveau is generally the default driver that is loaded for supported cards (i.e. mostly everything except Kepler at present) when booting a Linux distro without installing the Nvidia binary blob. Otherwise it's vesa. Nouveau is usually fine for basic desktop acceleration, but starts to struggle with real 3D work like native games (or Windows ones through Wine).

[Terbinator]

Nvidia's simultaneous driver updates for Linux generally improve performance every so often as well - it's nothing special for Windows and occurs for OSX and other more minor platforms too.

The people in Nvidia Linux driver development team are perfectly dedicated to the platform and actually create a pretty decent (albeit proprietary) driver. What Linus has a problem with is their management and legal teams - they refuse to provide any support or documentation to the Nouveau project (which I am involved in) who are attempting to create a proper open source driver for Nvidia GPUs for Linux. Due to this lack of assistance, it's a fraction of the speed and usually less stable, but does include some features the Nvidia driver doesn't (along with missing a tonne).

Nouveau is generally the default driver that is loaded for supported cards (i.e. mostly everything except Kepler at present) when booting a Linux distro without installing the Nvidia binary blob. Otherwise it's vesa. Nouveau is usually fine for basic desktop acceleration, but starts to struggle with real 3D work like native games (or Windows ones through Wine).

Wrong thread?

[tribaljet]

302.17 drivers for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris have been released on the 16th, along with a VERY extensive changelog.

[TJM DW]

Wrong thread?

No, I was responding to the overview of the article saying "Perhaps passively saying "F**k you" to Linus, as Windows performance improves.".

But it would have also been a valid comment in the previous news post dedicated to the subject.