It’s all about reducing CPU overheads and Nvidia’s latest GeForce 337.50 Beta drivers significantly improve things for DX11 GPUs. There have been big SLI improvements too.
AMD unveiled the Mantle update to their driver set as letting developers get ‘closer to the metal’, which means taking greater advantage of hardware power.
”By remaining laser-focused on DirectX 11 (and the forthcoming DirectX 12), we have dramatically enhanced the efficiency of our DirectX 11 driver, enabling performance gains of up to 71% in DirectX 11 games, and additional benefits in games with multi-GPU SLI support,” blogged Nvidia.
”Unlike changes tailored around custom graphics APIs, our new optimisations can benefit all DirectX 11 titles the second they go on sale, regardless of developer or publisher, and apply to all DirectX 11-capable NVIDIA GPUs.”
”Today’s 337.50 Beta drivers introduce the first of these optimisations, boosting performance in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Batman: Arkham Origins, Battlefield 4, BioShock Infinite, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Far Cry 3, Hitman Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, Sniper Elite V2, Star Swarm, Thief, Titanfall, Tomb Raider, and Total War: Rome 2, to name but a few examples.”
Nvidia naturally compared their new beta driver gains against old drivers and AMD’s Mantle. They also like to add that their driver updates benefit all DirectX 11 supporting GPUs and not just the latest GeForce cards.
The new beta drivers also ”dramatically reduced multi-GPU CPU overhead, resulting in considerable performance gains in CPU-bound games, and additional performance gains in the majority of SLI-enabled titles,” they continued.
”As with 337.50 Beta’s single-GPU DirectX 11 optimisations, CPU overhead reductions apply globally, benefitting the majority of DirectX 9, DirectX 10, and DirectX 11 games the instant they go on sale. Per-game optimisations will continue to be developed before and after a game’s release, but now every game can potentially see an immediate boost.”
”In 337.50 Beta we’ve also updated our Diablo III SLI profile for compatibility with the Reaper of Souls expansion, introduced a Total War: Rome 2 profile to enable SLI, which now works flawlessly thanks to a new game update, updated our Watch Dogs profile in anticipation of the game’s May 27th release, and added a War Thunder profile to enable SLI in the popular free-to-play flight combat game,” blogged Nvidia.
Check out the full Nvidia blog to learn more about the latest 337.50 Beta performance drivers.
