GeForce 295.51 Driver released

You might want to reconsider that... taken from HardOCP's review of the HD 7950: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/01/30/amd_radeon_hd_7950_video_card_review/15

"CrossFireX performance was a mixed bag with the Radeon HD 7950. Some games performed well, some games did not. This is simply another finger we can point at CrossFireX drivers as not being all those should be.

Troubled Games and CrossFireX

AMD still has its work cut out with CrossFireX drivers. We've encountered two games here that do not seem to do well with Radeon HD 7950 CrossFireX. Batman was the worse, the performance was unusually slow with Radeon HD 7950 CrossFireX, possibly indicating immature drivers for a game that was released in November of 2011. Skyrim also performed rather poorly in comparison, also a title released in November of last year. NVIDIA has a leg up on AMD with Skyrim multi-GPU performance. Of course, NVIDIA also had SLI support for Skyrim months before AMD had any CrossFireX support in the game.

There is always an aspect of gameplay performance that is hard to relate to gamers through a graph, or even words. We are talking about physically "feeling" a game as you play it. What people perceive as playable performance is not always attached to framerate. This seems to be a fact of CrossFireX that we've encountered in our gameplay testing. At times, the framerate being displayed on the screen doesn't match what we are "feeling" as we play the game.

For example, if 40 or 50 FPS is indicated, even though that should be playable since its above 30 FPS it won't necessarily feel playable. We have to shoot for higher FPS. We experience some kind of lag or choppiness in gameplay with CrossFireX even though the framerate indicates it should be playable. This means you cannot always rely on framerate alone to determine playable performance.

This is a difference that separates CrossFireX from SLI. With SLI we do not experience this phenomenon as much. With SLI, framerates seem smoother at lower framerates, than these do with CrossFireX. For example, we often find we need to aim for higher framerates in order for CrossFireX to feel like it’s playable. Whereas, with SLI we often find we can settle with lower framerates, because it feels playable at those framerates. Trust us, we do not go by framerates when evaluating how these cards actually game. The framerates a lie.

Some of this can be seen in the graphs, when we talk about consistency. We've shown it in this evaluation, look back at the Deus Ex or Skyrim graphs and you will see SLI producing a more consistent framerate. These are just facts between CrossFireX and SLI, but it makes it so that SLI feels smoother and better to us, than CrossFireX does often. This was the case a lot of the time testing Radeon HD 7950 CrossFireX versus GeForce GTX 580 SLI. We just felt GeForce GTX 580 SLI offered a smoother experience, in pretty much every game, even the ones where Radeon HD 7950 CrossFireX allowed higher in-game settings."

 

^
[H] is flawed and its the only site really bitching about AMD. Also their tests are useless most of the time, who want's to play at bare 30fps.


I didnt see Hilbert or Anadtech or other better site saying the same issues...


Also why do we have this conversation here, let that guy go to AMD its his choice. And i don't blame him, nv drivers are going downhill for some time now.

 

amd is worse driver wise, doesnt matter how many drivers they release.

 

Maybe you should read the whole review then eh?

Because what you are saying and what I read here do not jive my friend.


-edit-

I don't know what's up, but either Nvidia needs to fix how they package their drivers or they need to drop support for ancient cards or something. These 200Mb+ driver packages need to be brought down IMHO. I got some old XP drivers saved that take all of 15Mb FFS. A lot of wasted bandwidth for all these.

 

And maybe you should start discussing this in a new thread?


edit: like i mentioned [H] is not the best, and that's why i said that article was flawed.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2521219&postcount=93

 

I had a 5970 card and AMD drivers were really terrible at that point, also AMD opengl performance is very weak.
Switched to two gtx580 and it's night and day difference. Nvidia cards simple work, without much issues.
AMD crossfire sucks, because it works very erractly. FPS fluctuates a lot, giving a stuttery feeling. Nvidia SLI is more stable.
You can check that in most HardOCP reviews.

 

Don't get all high and mighty now, ROFL.

 

Anyone having texture flickering in Crysis 2 (max settings, maldo mod) with these drivers and 290.53 as well? It happens with trees, transparent objects like fences and some object here and there... Quite annoying. They flash all the time, almost.

 

HardOCP bitch about AMD CrossFireX drivers for the new HD 7900 cards because several of their writers own them, that's why! If they were happy with the drivers then they wouldn't be complaining! They have been in contact with AMD about these issues; AMD are aware of them and promise to address them. It's honesty like that which leads to better drivers so I don't see any bias or dishonesty on their part.

Their methods of testing are somewhat different from most other sites, choosing instead to test the maximum settings a card can manage for a game whilst still remaining playable. This is how they pick up issues that other sites might miss or overlook. That is a good thing IMO. Their review of NVIDIA's first Kepler card will be the first one I read then Guru3D's, of course!

 

Drivers crashed after reboot. Graphical distortions then complete freeze up.
Clean install. What the hell? Rolled back to 290.53 in safe mode.

 

Looks like this 290 series is a complete disaster.

 

I'm not having any issues with these... so far so good. My only and every complaint with every release thus far is a PRECHECKED Nvidia Update box. Stop forcing people to auto-update nvidia!! Many times some drivers have caused cards to fry or other issues so why push a update onto people that already have something working? After all, a working driver for most won't push them to even look for an update. This box needs to be unchecked by default and not thrown up into people's faces.

 

Based on what? Your own experiences, the poster directly above yours, what?

There will always be a number of people who have problems with a new driver, that's just the nature of the PC with its trillions of different hardware/software combinations, but a few negative comments doesn't mean everyone is having problems. The 290.53 betas have been 100% issue-free for me for example.

 

took them that long just for that ???

any performance increase on any single game ??

GG nvidia, way to go ...

 

After a few hours of Battlefield 3, these driver felt the same as the previous beta. I still encounter sudden hang-ups, forcing me to reset my PC and ONLY happen on Battlefield 3. Other games that I play ( StarCraft2, Dota2, Batman:AC, MW3 ) has no issue and plays just fine leaving me to conclude that BF3 is the problem not the v.card driver. The only solution for me to prevent the random hang-up on BF3 is to manually increase my v.card voltage from 1.012v to 1.025v.

 

Yeah, unclicking the box is a real strain.

You probably click 50, 000 times in any given game, or you know....using the OS.

 

This driver hanged my BF3 after just 2 minutes in game, so I reverted to previous beta.

I don't know how to increase voltage (I better stay off this), but previous beta plays more or less stable when I set power option in NVCPL to "prefer maximum performance".

 

I might be wrong but I think they may have spent a lot of time trying to fix the TDR issue as it is mentioned in the release notes.

I'm kind of disappointed myself that there aren't performance increases for Batman: Arkham City under DX11 as it still doesn't run as smoothly as it should do even after the patch. I was hoping this driver would have them as I planned on returning to the game now I've ran of things to do in Skyrim (believe me, I'm crying inside at this).

 

I wrote "looks like". Anyway my experience so far with two games (Mafia II and Crysis 2) is not good. I've got texture flickering/flashing (with no OC and with OC) in both games, everything @default in NVCP. I've just bought my video card, so it could be driver related or a faulty model. After all this waiting I thought they came out with good drivers, instead they focused only on 3D Vision and SLI. In addition I never had issues with nvlddmkm.sys while watching multiple videos... I expected a longer changelog and much more bugfixes... In the past support was better (except for that frying gpu driver).