NVIDIA Game Ready 347.52 Driver Analysis

Final Thoughts

So for our final round-up, we have noticed that our benchmarking software saw very little effect from these drivers, the most noticeable scores are listed below.

The increased performance from the new drivers:

• Batman at 1080p saw 20% increase for the GTX 970 and 10% at 1440p;
• Batman at 1080p provided a 25% and 15% increase for the GTX 960 at 1080p and 1440p respectively;
• Tomb Raider at 1080p provided a 26% increase for the GTX 970;
• Battlefied at 4K saw an increase of 14% and 12% for the GTX 980 and GTX 970 respectively.

The decreased performance from the new drivers:

• Hitman at 4K: a huge 21% loss for the GTX 980. We are now working together to source a fix to our problem and this will be updated with any results.

We are happy with the results gathered today, some very tasty performance increases for a simple driver install. We did see a few negative performance changes, but these are known issues to NVIDIA and will most likely we targeted within the next driver update.

When this driver was released, NVIDIA stated the following:

GeForce GTX 980 – 2560×1440 –Metro: Last Light: up to 10%

GeForce GTX 970 – 1920×1080 – BioShock Infinite: up to 13%

These are NVIDIA’s expected gains, which has been attained from their own test system. At both of these resolutions and benchmarks, we saw around 1% increase compared to their 10% and 13%.  Even though each test yields a different result, each test has been carried out numerous times and an average taken to ensure no skewed results from a cold graphics card or very high ambient temperatures.

On the plus side, there has been some nice increases for the GTX 970 at 1080p, although if you own a GTX 970, you’re most likely playing at 1440p or higher, so these increases won’t really affect you massively. Battlefield gains a decent 14% and 12% increase for the GTX 980 and GTX 970 respectively at 4K; a very good result for its target consumers.

We would like to recommend this driver, WHQL 347.52. It provides a lot of stable performance increases compared to its previous iteration and supports a wide range of graphics cards; a worthwhile installation.

Thank you to all our partners who provided the hardware and software that made this driver analysis possible.