Our test system - featuring the latest Haswell-E technology from Intel, X99 gaming motherboard from GIGABYTE, and additional critical components from Corsair – allows the NVIDIA GPU to operate unencumbered by some of the usual bottlenecks when gaming. On the other hand this system doesn't necessarily reflect benefits from reductions in CPU load, which disproportionately favours less muscular CPUs. Furthermore it’s not the sort of everyday system which the general populace would have access too. This underlines the fact that the performance figures shown in this article are intended to show relative performance rather than expected performance in mainstream systems, i.e. how much has performance improved for NVIDIA Maxwell-based hardware since launch, purely due to the drivers.

NVIDIA Dynamic Super resolution is the second aspect of NVIDIA’s driver package we want to test. The specific card chosen is an excellent example of the GTX 970 range, featuring top of the line GIGABYTE WINDFORCE 3X non-reference cooling that enables a factory overclocks to 1150MHz base and over 1.3GHz on the boost clock; no further overclocking was performed either on it or the CPU.



The GIGABYTE GTX 970 G1 GAMING 4GB video memory clocks at 7Gbps (GDDR5) and a 256-bit wide memory bus which also takes advantage of Third Generation Delta Colour Compression. This lossless algorithm allows better use of the memory bandwidth available, which is essential for higher resolution rendering, texture sizes and IQ settings. Benefits realised by using this algorithm largely depend on the scene but internally NVIDIA estimate that the GTX 980 has between 17 and 25% more effective use of memory bandwidth than the GTX 680.

Every GeForce GTX 970 exhibits the 3.5/0.5GB memory partition recently uncovered, which will limit performance at very high texture qualities and rendering resolutions. This would impact predominantly Dynamic Super Resolution in our testing, but generally problems have occurred in multi-GPU configurations looking to take image quality settings steps further still.

Nonetheless, only a few GPU models are more capable at high resolution gaming than this card, making it ideal not only for testing Nvidia DSR but also just the sort of card on the cusp of 4K-capable horsepower.

Testing Tools




The above applications provide us with a modest spread of synthetic and real-world datapoints from which we can assess performance changes for the transition to 347.52 from a recent stable driver release.