Quick Test: NVIDIA ForceWare 186.18 vs ForceWare 190.38
Here is a quick performance test of ForceWare 186.18 WHQL vs ForceWare 190.38 WHQL.
Testbed:
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 default clocks
- Mainboard: EVGA 790i Ultra SLI
- Memory: 2048Mb DDR3
- Graphics card: EVGA GeForce GTX 295 CO OP Edition – default clocks (GPU core:576MHz / Shaders: 1242MHz and memory: 1008MHz)
- WinXP SP2 32-bit
- FurMark 1.7.0 (OpenGL)
- FluidMark 1.1.1 (OpenGL / PhysX)
- Lightsmark 2008 (OpenGL)
- Unigine Tropics 1.2 (OpenGL / Direct3D)
Settings:
- FurMark and FluidMark: fullscreen 1280×1024 60 seconds
- Lightsmark 2008: default
- Unigine Tropics 1.2: fullscreen 1280×1024 anisotropy 4X
| ForceWare 186.18 | ForceWare 190.38 | Gain | FurMark | 4239 | 4275 | +0.85% | FurMark
SLI | 8507 | 8505 | 0% | FurMark
MSAA 16X | 1122 | 1120 | 0% | FurMark
MSAA 16X + SLI | 2232 | 2230 | 0% | FluidMark 1.1.1 | 10452 | 10546 | +1.0% | Lightsmark2008
SLI | 716 | 733 | +2.4% | Lightsmark2008 | 652 | 732 | +12.3% | Unigine Tropics D3D9 | 1879 | 1920 | +2.2% | Unigine Tropics D3D9
SLI | 3372 | 3473 | +3% | Unigine Tropics D3D9
SLI + MSAA 8X | 2678 | 2703 | +1.0% | Unigine Tropics OpenGL | 1631 | 1625 | -0.3% | Unigine Tropics OpenGL
SLI | 936 | 942 | +0.6 |
Conclusion: under Windows XP, there’s a little performance gain but if you are fine with ForceWare 186.18, it’s not necessary to update them unless you want to enjoy the new features like power management or CUDA 2.3 (you need the 190.38 to play with CUDA 2.3 SDK samples…). |