New graphics card driver from NVIDIA for all laptops

179.28 for almost all GeForce graphics cards.

NVIDIA is releasing today the first in a series of laptop graphics drivers which is compatible with almost all recent notebooks. The new driver promises a lot: bug fixes, improvements in performance, CUDA and PhysX support. In this review, you will find out how the new graphics driver performed when it was used to run different NVIDIA graphics cards and play the latest games on them.

Of course we wanted to take a closer look at the imrovements in performance which the new driver offers. The best we to do this would be to take a few notebooks with the latest graphics cards, and test the driver with them. We will go into more details about our test in the second and third part of this review.

Let us begin instead with the official data released by NVIDIA. To get this data, NVIDIA took three older graphics cards of the GeForce 8000M series and compared the very old 156.90 driver to the new 179.28. Thanks to the many improvements made in the meantime, the results of the test were pretty amazing. The performance had increased by 10 to 110% according to the official data.

NVIDIA also examined the SLI performance with a GeForce 8800M GTX SLI combination. This time they used a somewhat newer, but still very old, 167.66 driver as a reference. The increases in performance that the results show are very impressive. However, they can be easily explained. The first SLI notebook driver sadly had a lot of flaws and was not optimized for games that were released much later. Each of the resolution/ AF/ AA levels were also picked after careful consideration. Despite all that, the increases in performance of up to 340% show how important it is, especially for gamers, to constantly update the driver.

Our performance comparison is divided into game tests (games with integrated benchmarks) and sythetic benchmarks (like the 3D Mark series). We ran the benchmarks with the graphics driver that had been delivered with along with the graphics cards for the notebooks (the 174.82 for the 9300M, the 175.61 for the 9600M and the 176.09 for the 9800M GTX SLI).
We repeated each benchmark 3-4 times to get the results shown in the following diagrams.

First we tested a series of older games (especially interesting for the weaker test models). For this we chose the games that still required high performance, like World in Conflict (WIC), Half Life 2 - Lost Coast and Supreme Commander - Forged Alliance.

World in Conflict

WiC showed marginal changes between a resolution of 1024x768 very high and a resolution of 800x600 very low. Due to the fluctuations in the benchmark itself, these results are not worth noting. Only with the Odin E805II, with and without SLI, a resolution of 1920x1200, and details set to very high, could we observe an increase in performance of up to 25%. With the SLI configuration, WiC ran with 16 to 20 fps (the benchmark is very demanding and the strategy game does not necessarily need high frame rates).

Supreme Commander - Forged Alliance

Supreme Commander is still very demanding (especially when playing big multiplayer battles), and it excites the gamer with its combination of complexity with good graphics. We let the integrated benchmark, which shows a huge multiplayer battle in 1024x768 with high details (including 4x Anti-Aliasing), run on all of our notebooks.

The results were surprising. The frame rates decreased a little on all of the laptops except for the Nexoc E625 with the 9600M GT.

Half Life 2 - Lost Coast

Even the evergreen Half Life 2 (thanks to the pending episode 3) managed to get into our benchmark parkour. However, in the benchmark of Lost Coast, with a resolution of 1024x768 and high details, the negatives by far outweighed the postives. Still the special level ran smoothly on all the laptops.

Call of Juarez

The western shooter game, Call of Juarez, is another one of the games we tested. We used the available benchmarks for this game, testing it with a resolution of 1024x768 and 1920x1200, with high details and DirectX 10 effects.

The new driver scored really high in these tests. We concluded that all the notebooks had faster rendering (except for the Nexoc Osiris E623 GT on which the benchmark did not start).

Far Cry 2

Of course we could not exclude brand new games from our comparison. We took the "Africa shooter" Far Cry 2 to begin with. The game notified us that the graphics cards, which had been delivered with the laptops, were outdated; however, they rendered the game without any visible restrictions.

We were surprised that after the installation the performance on all platforms, with a resolution of 1024x768 and high details, decreased by a small amount. There was a slight increase in performance with the 9300M GS, but that happened only when the resolution was changed to 800x600 and the details were set to minimum. The 9600M GT was especially affected as it showed an average decrease of 14% in performance after 3 runs. We asked NVIDIA about this matter, and received the following answer:

"...Unfortunately, this is a known and current driver issue we have with the Benchmark utility within FC2. We’re currently working on a solution and will be offering that in a subsequent driver release."

So there is hope that in the next driver release the performance will increase significantly.

Crysis Warhead

Last but not least, we tested the performance of the new driver with Crysis Warhead. With the Crysis benchmark the new driver finally managed to score nearly full points with all the different resolutions and levels of detail.

synthetic Benchmarks

We did not expect to see any great increases here, as most of the graphics cards are designed to be optimal for the synthetic benchmarks. Only with the 3D Mark Vantage could we observe noteworthy increases in performance. These were epecially big when the PhysX calculation, by the GPU, were activated. However, as the PhysX calculations are the work of the CPU, this would not really be fair in a model comparison.

The poor results of the new driver in the OpenGL Test of Cinebench R10 were a big negative suprise. In this test, the drivers, which were delivered with the laptops, had a clear advantage (except for the Compal HL90, which seems to be already delivered with a driver designed for heavy consumer usage). Users, who use OpenGL programs on a regular basis, should think twice before changing to the new driver.