5 driver performance comparisons

tested on HP DV5 1015ea:

2.26 GHz P8400 Centrino 2
4086 GB RAM
250GB HDD
Blu-Ray drive
9200gs 256MB DDR2 graphics

i have just finished comparing 5 drivers for use with this graphics card, and the results obtained may translate to other cards also. I used 3dmark06 to get these results. each driver had 3 runs. the 3 marks were all fairly consistent between runs. i will give the highest result obtained. none seemed anomalous.

i uninstalled the display driver, then ran driver sweeper in safe mode, before reinstalling the new driver each time.

here are the results:
179.28: 1589
181.20: 1795
185.20: 1795
Dox optimised 181.20: 1789 (balanced configuration)
Dox optimised 181.20: 1821 (performance configuration)

(peak temperature recorded was 54*C using Dox performance)


as you can see the drivers make a fairly considerable difference to the performance. an increase of 232 points is a 15% increase in score.

this is surprisingly easy to see in in-game performance as well. before these tests i was using the 185.20 drivers, and was getting frame rates of between 9 and 12 in the first scene of crysis with everything set to low (bar model details, which was set to medium). after installing the Dox performance optimised drivers i got an incredibly consistent reading of 16FPS with most settings changed to medium. with the settings on low (as before), i got 19FPS.

thanks

Ross

 

nice ! , it must be time consuming to collect all that data lol

 

well, i started about 4am and finished about 10am, doing stuff at the same time for some of it though. but yeah, it wasnt quick. lol.

 

You talk about testing ...

i stop a while ago , but here's my list , i should try some of the new driver ..

 

I hope u went back to 169.04, nice performance with those, though the 185.20's are supposed to be the best drivers for 8/9 series so far.

 

One thing .. all those testing were done in VISTA , but now im using 185.20 for Vista ...

But since i mostly use XP for gaming now , i use the 181.20 DOX optimize drive , wich give me the best score for stock clock !

I don't really want to overclock my laptop if i don't have too , so i just tested those 2 driver stock clock in XP..

Regular 179.28 : 1280*768 Resolution : 1823 (117 over the best one in vista )9
Dox Optimize Perf 181.20 : 1280*768 : 1913 (208 over the best in Vista)

I tried installing the 185.20 in xp but keep getting error and loading in 4bit color .. so i will stick with the Dox one ...