Frankly, Nvidia has little to prove when it comes to their driver roll-out schedule and stability. Through years of hard work and close co-operation with software developers they've garnered a reputation for regularity and consistency which is second to none. AMD released their Catalyst Omega drivers at the tail end of last year, and for them it will hopefully be a watershed moment; Nvidia's own moment came and went years ago, and they grasped the nettle admirably.

In that vein the GeForce 347.52 drivers exhibit large improvements in certain key areas - raw Assassins Creed Unity frame rates being a prime example - as well as incremental improvements to overall performance. However this is only half the equation; there's only so much Nvidia can do with its drivers, and at some stage developers need to provide a game which is well optimised for as many platforms as possible. Once again Assassins Creed Unity is the quintessential example for which, despite all the trumpeting of Nvidia working closely with Ubisoft in the development of the game, hardware driver tweaks can only go so far.

Nonetheless Nvidia are undeterred, adding in both the excellent Dynamic Super Resolution for greater graphical fidelity, and the various tools for which GeForce Experience is swiftly becoming famous. Whilst the Nvidia Control Panel has its place, GeForce Experience makes these features accessible to the masses; by keeping its development in house they can and have made getting more out of your GPU easy for everyone.



GIGABYTE's GTX 970 G1 GAMING 4G was a trooper throughout, just as we expected from our initial review of the card. Built on the strong foundations of Nvidia's Maxwell architecture and supported by GIGABYTE's own WINDFORCE cooling technology, the GPU seems like an ideal match for the ever-increasing range of G-SYNC monitors currently on the market. Despite recent disappointing reports over the efficacy of its 4GB VRAM pool the card has still been able to put up strong numbers which would result in a great gaming experience.

We will be keeping an eye on driver releases over the course of Maxwell's lifetime to judge performance improvements.

Nvidia's driver programme sets the standard when it comes to being ready for every relevant game launch, but we've also shown that post-launch support is also excellent. The driver team continues to eek out small margins for all scenarios whilst simultaneously making large double-digit performance strides in the most relevant games. Gone are the days where you only update 'when something doesn't work', now updating early and often makes sense and is trivial to do.



Our thanks to Intel, Corsair and GIGABYTE for providing some of the hardware necessary for this article.