NVIDIA continue to impress with the pace of driver updates, but at times that makes keeping up with the latest release quite a tough task in of itself. GeForce Experience is a welcome utility when it comes to managing the task, even if the soon-to-be implemented policy of locking Game Ready Drivers behind a registration wall rankles. The question we wish to ponder however is how much driver updates over the past year add to overall performance, and that’s certainly difficult to assess. What we now have is an indication of the baked-in benefits over 12 months (since the release of the GeForce GTX 970) to a static system config, and the results are mixed.
At standard gaming resolutions and quality levels the improvement over time in just our small sub-set of benchmarks is significant, although not even across all titles. Whilst gaming at 1080p with the GTX 970 appears to be boosted to a significant degree – especially in Assassins Creed, where over 12 months the improvement has been nothing short of staggering - synthetic benchmarks have remained relatively consistent. 3DMark Firestrike results for instance took a step forward early after the GPUs release, but haven’t budged since then. That indicates that NVIDIA have become more adept at tailoring drivers to specific games, rather than monolithic 'one-size fits all' solutions.
A more marked change could be seen at higher resolutions utilising NVIDIA’s Dynamic Super Resolution, where in comparison to the results gathered in February performance in both Far Cry 4 and Thief at 1440p and 4K took a major step forward. This doesn’t indicate necessarily that either game is comfortably playable at the highest resolutions in this hardware configuration, a far more in-depth analysis would need to be performed to assess that notion, but it certainly indicates that NVIDIA have taken major strides forward for games and situations that are memory intensive.
By comparison our DSR results for Assassins Creed Unity are confusing. Average frame rates at 1440p and 4K drop markedly but minimums are up, indicating an overall more consistent experience. Although we’d love to make a grand statement about what this means for the drivers it would be irresponsible to do so; all we can say is that it warrants further investigation. Anecdotally we can comment that the rate of texture pop-in appears to differ between the drivers, and that might be due to underlying differences in the way the game engine is behaving.
So, from all that, what general statements are possible? Well, it’s certainly true that GPUs gain a major boost over their expected lifetime purely from drivers, but that boost isn’t even across the board and will differ based on the test scenario. You can't for instance look at a benchmark suite from 12 months ago and blindly offset all results by a percentage to get even slightly accurate values, all you can do is re-test with the up-to-date drivers or make it clear how out-of-date older tests are. When you think about it that makes a lot of sense – not all test cases will use every capability the driver has, so when some aspect of the driver’s operation becomes more efficient only certain test cases will see a benefit.
What does that mean for the user? In general, 'Stay up to Date' remains the mantra, but even the small sub-set of scenarios looked at here show that tweaking settings plays as important a role in getting a good in-game experience as paying top dollar for a new GPU. Don't be afraid to tweak those settings or make use of NVIDIA's GeForce Experience game profile recommendations as it will in most cases be worth the effort.
As for Game Ready Drivers, we remain on the fence as to their efficacy. Undoubtedly of value when the quality of the PC version is better than average, i.e. The Witcher III and Metal Gear Solid V, they're still not a magic bullet. They cannot fix a broken launch, and improvements are often more significant many weeks later when games have gone through a number of patches and is in a relatively stable state.
And finally, GIGABYTE's GTX 970 G1 GAMING 4G once again proved its mettle and continued to stake a claim as the best 'bang for you buck' card available. Obviously paired with a somewhat over the top Intel CPU in this instance, it would be a great match for Intel's new Skylake Core i5 or i7 CPUs and monitors or up to 1440p resolution.
NVIDIA set the standard in their commitment to Game Ready Drivers, and over the past 10 months have even continue to boost performance in titles which no longer sit in release spotlight. Over the course of a year the GTX 970 has been boosted in performance by as much as 20% in selected benchmarks where frame rates were already at playable levels, representing substantial value that shouldn't be ignored. Updating your drivers rarely has a downside today unlike yesteryear, and by ignoring new releases you will be leaving performance on the table.
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Our thanks to Intel, Corsair and GIGABYTE for providing some of the hardware necessary for this article.
