NVIDIA ForceWare 257.15 Performance Analysis

We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASRock, Kingston, Western Digital, Noctua and Thermaltake.

As we mentioned in our introduction, we'll be looking at the new 257.15 drivers against the previous 197.41 ones. We'll be looking at both the single GTX 470 and GTX 480 while also looking at the GTX 470 in SLI.

Fingers crossed we'll see some good performance gains. As we mentioned already, the models did get off to a bit of a rocky start, but we've seen companies like Galaxy and Palit offer us upgraded cooling which combats both the heat and noise issue. Today hopefully the new drivers will fix some of the performance issues we had with the driver.

Let's get started!

3DMark Vantage

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0.1
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com
Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmarkvantage/
Buy It Here

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware.

3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

GTX 470 SLI - Here we see a very nice performance gain under both presets.

GTX 480 - Here we see a very nice performance gain under both presets.

GTX 470 - Here we see a very nice performance gain under both presets.