Introduction
Driver updates, those seemingly pointless notifications at the bottom of your screen that always seem to pop up just as you start a movie or game. Some? Completely pointless, Others? Performance enhancing. Today we’re going to take a look at the brand new NVIDIA Game Ready Driver 347.52 and compare this to its most recent comparable driver update; Game Ready Driver 347.25. Using our brand new test bench, we’ll be retesting the GeForce GTX 980, GTX 970 and GTX 960 as these three graphics cards were outlined in the release notes. Almost all of the previous generations are included within this driver update also. All information regarding the 347.52 Driver can be found here. This is a chart taken from NVIDIA’s driver site, this states NVIDIA’s prospected gains among the GTX 900 series.
NVIDIA released the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 during September 2014 and held out to release their storming, mid range GeForce GTX 960 at the end of January 2015. During our testing with our new test bench, all was completed using the most recent Game Ready Driver 347.25. This came to us as a Day One driver with the GeForce GTX 960 and proved to be a very stable driver update. During our testing, we will only analyse games; generally benchmark software isn’t affected by driver updates unless specified.
Most of the games tested are ones that didn’t get a performance increase, wtf?