There are two aspects of driver performance we need to analyse for this article: in-game performance improvements against previous patches, and the performance impact of gradually higher levels of DSR in comparison to previous tests. The former will allow us to assess whether GPU performance boost are system-wide with the latest NVIDIA drivers or game-specific, and the latter gives us some indication of whether DSR and high-resolution gaming has been impacted by the new drivers.

Our baseline is NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 970 launch drivers – codename 344.11 – released in October 2014 for Maxwell performance parts. The second data point is February’s 347.52 release, tested in our DSR introduction driver article. Third is August’s 355.82 package, launched to coincide with the entry-level GeForce GTX 950, which we’ll use for comparison at 1080p. Finally there’s the 358.91 Game Ready Driver for Fallout 4, NVIDIA’s most recent GeForce driver package.

Initial tests looked at the performance difference in a range of games and synthetic benchmarks to assess how well the new drivers had incorporated application-specific improvements and if across the board performance had been unlocked by subsequent driver releases. Follow-up tests analysed NVIDIA Dynamic Super Resolution performance, looking at not only performance but also qualitative impact on the experience.