GeForce 337.50 Beta AKA "The Mantle Killer"

This is the much-ballyhooed driver which promises significant CPU performance optimizations in a number of titles and which Nvidia claims will allow its cards to dethrone AMD GPU's running Mantle.

ETA is Mon Apr 07, 2014. As of this writing it has not been released yet.

Details have been leaked courtesy of the Guru3D Forums and GeForce.com:

Spoiler

What’s New in Version 337.50

Performance
Introduces key DirectX optimizations which result in reduced game-loading times and significant performance increases across a wide variety of games. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration. Here are some examples of measured gains versus the previous 335.23 WHQL driver:

GeForce GTX 700 Series (Single GPU):
Up to 64% in Total War: Rome II
Up to 25% in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Up to 23% in Sleeping Dogs
Up to 21% in Star Swarm
Up to 15% in Batman: Arkham Origins
Up to 10% in Metro: Last Light
Up to 8% in Hitman Absolution
Up to 7% in Sniper Elite V2
Up to 6% in Tomb Raider
Up to 6% in F1 2013

GeForce GTX 700 Series (SLI):
Up to 71% in Total War: Rome II
Up to 53% in Sniper Elite V2
Up to 45% in Aliens vs. Predator
Up to 31% in Sleeping Dogs
Up to 20% in CoD: Black Ops 2
Up to 10% in Hitman Absolution
Up to 9% in F1 2013
Up to 7% in Far Cry 3
Up to 6% in Metro: Last Light
Up to 6% in Batman: Arkham Origins

SLI Technology:
Total War: Rome II – added profile
War Thunder – added profile
Watch Dogs – updated profile
Diablo III – updated profile

Gaming Technology
Supports GeForce ShadowPlay™ technology
Supports GeForce ShadowPlay™ Twitch Streaming

SHIELD
Supports NVIDIA GameStream™ technology

3D Vision
Supports new “3D Compatibility Mode” for 3D Vision that enables us to improve the 3D experience for many key DirectX 10 and 11 games

3D Vision Profiles
Path of Exile – rated “Good”
KickBeat – rating now “Excellent”

3D Compatibility Mode Profiles
Assassin’s Creed Liberation – previously “Not Recommended”, now rated as “Excellent”
Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army – previously “Good”, now rated as “Excellent”
Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army 2 – previously “Good”, now rated as “Excellent
Strike Suit Zero – previously “Not Recommended”, now rated as “Good”
Watchdogs – rated as “Good”

Desktop/Notebook:
Nvidia 337.50 Desktop/Notebook Driver Release Date Mon Apr 07, 2014
Nvidia 337.50 Desktop/Notebook Lite Driver Release Date Mon Apr 07, 2014

Release Notes:
RN v337.50

Additional Details:
Installs new PhysX System Software
Installs HD Audio
Installs GeForce Experience

 

Looks like they improved SLI by a great deal. The improvements on SLI is better than the single card improvements.

Me likey. Can`t wait to see the reviews.

 

The really cynical part of me thinks that if it wasn't for Mantle, god knows how long nVidia would've taken to release this, assuming they'd even be bothered enough to do all these optimizations.

 

And I would say the same for DX12. It's not cynical at all; we all know it's the reality. I mean why hasn't Intel made any significant improvements since Sandy Bridge? Because of lack of competition from AMD.

 

AMD is the sole reason why Intel have abandoned CPU performance and concentrated on the freaking stupid IGP/APU race.

Everybody wins...Except gamers....

 

so nothing new for improvements in titanfall or ghosts then. sli brigade will be pissed then.

 

No mention of BF4, I suppose that's a lost cause.

Very impressive numbers, though. If those percentages stick, I'll be very happy.

 

Up to 64% in Total War: Rome II

...

Excuse my asterisks but... **** YES!!! Rome II has abysmal performance. Really excited for this driver now.

 

Note the "up to" clause. Honestly I've learned to take those numbers with a grain of salt.

 

You notice that the SLI get most benefits plus Rome II. Both are very CPU dependant. I think Nvidia have solved some of the CPU bottleneck that comes with DX11. Just like Mantle, Im very sceptical about 64% with a high end CPU...

But we will see

 

What's wrong with using custom profile settings and SLI compatibility bits in Nvidia Inspector?

There should be performance improvements in many titles, not just the examples listed by Nvidia. If not in this driver then in subsequent ones. If you recall, Nvidia's marketing slides for this driver put its card head-to-head against AMD's in Thief and Star Swarm, neither of which are listed in this release. So I don't think that list is comprehensive. The driver apparently optimizes Nvidia GPU's for DX11 to reduce CPU overhead and I'd expect the greatest benefit to be in CPU-bound titles and system configurations, which is exactly what Mantle does. BF4 is one such example of a CPU-heavy game.

Yep exactly. I've gotten no increases when it was advertised, and when it wasn't advertised I got huge performance increases.

 

That's what I was thinking, but the changelog says that the listed games are "some examples", so maybe there'll be improvements for those Titanfall/Ghosts too.

 

Well, if it was anything significant, they would have probably listed them as well, since they're popular games.

 

There should be more to this driver, i have seen slides somewhere on facebook where nvidia claimed to outperform Mantle in some titles that are not listed in that list of games.
If they managed to optimize CPU bottlenecks from DirectX then those optimizations are probably not limited to those games only, we will see
Those are some impressive numbers, even if not 64% it should still give the much needed performance in Rome 2

 

Just a side note: how stretched must be "key Dx optimizations" if they also stretched results up to loud "reduced game-loading time"? Like what - 1 second and 2-4% more fps? Surely I'm in a line who is happy with any performance game but +65% in one game means nothing except game's optimization while +10% to Metro LL (which is somewhat old already) speaks much closer to result. My bet is... 6% average on top GPUs.

 

Any thoughts on what the impact might be on benchmarking? I believe I have seen driver changelogs mention improved performance in 3DMark etc. but why not this time? I'll be sure to give it a benching session on Monday or so..

 

Well the CPU does work unpacking assets and decompressing files during game loading so it's not illogical, although I'd have to question what difference it'll make if game is already installed on SSD.

Rome II runs like $hit and has been in dire need of optimization since release so I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia finally had a breakthrough that allowed them to achieve a massive performance gain. Just the simple act of enabling SLI support at long last should improve performance immensely for SLI users who've had to endure single-GPU until now.

 

I guess 600 series get the performance boost as well? though they only listed the number for 700 series. Any chance the driver going to help fermi?

 

600 Series definitely since they're same Kepler. Fermi not so sure, but we'll see.

 

nvidia's marketing team likes to round up figures, 10% can be from 8-9 percent and maybe even less xD

 

And that "up to" clause really makes those numbers meaningless. I remember a particularly egregious case where "up to 50%" was claimed in a game, but only when gaming at 4K resolution with 3x Titan or something like that.

 

It has arrived;

64bit: NVIDIA DRIVERS GeForce 337.50 Driver (BETA) BETA
32bit: NVIDIA DRIVERS GeForce 337.50 Driver (BETA) BETA

Includes GFE 2.0 with ShadowPlay for notebooks!

 

I'm at work. Someone test this with a 680m and tell me if it does anything please...

Eh, I'm not expecting much to be fair but this could potential be very cool if the improvements work across board (and I don't see why they wouldn't seeing as the 7** series is basically a rebranded 6** series).

 

660m, Metro LL benchmark. +2% gain. It's like Xfiles: Performance boost... Out somewhere.
However I felt it was more "fluid" and no stuttering though.

Hope games will have better result.

 

I think they just hyped this driver because of mantle, most of the performance improvements are like 2-5%, not even upto 10% let alone upto 71%

 

I just did a Sleeping Dogs benchmark... Nothing worth writing home about.

 

In other news your cable company has been promising you download speeds up to x mbps for years.. I'm sure there will be situations where this driver shines but for those of us with relatively beefy CPUs it might take a while to run into one of those situations.

 

Probably something along these lines for the "up to 71%" claims.

 

Well, maybe it is placebo but I think I might got few fps to Metro LL. I recall it was 18-sh - 19-sh last time I eperimented with settings (aka SSAA 2X FHD and Advanced PhysX on my not prepared for this GPU) while now I got 20-22 underground.
This is in compare to 331.86 + Win7.

 

ugh shadowplay isnt enabled for 650m -_-.....WHY?

 

I heared it isn't enabled for Optimus systems.

 

i5 2450M / GT630M (540M) 2GD3

The performance gain is amazing using this driver, overclock + utilization is MUCH more stable in BF4

"Wonder Driver" lives up to it's name

 

Improvements seem to be very slight on my 770M, but hey, every bit is good.

 

So... Is it worth upgrading the driver for 240M?

 

Check out the quick test by Tom's. As I expected, less than 5% improvement except for Star Swarm, and as one of the comments pointed out this could be the driver itself messing with the rendering.

So much hype about absolutely nothing lol

 

Well, at least you have a feeling of having the latest and the finest ATM

 

Actually still running 331.65, because this is the only driver of the recent releases that doesn't completely break SLI in Red Faction Armageddon

 

AMD had worse results lol
Thief Gets AMD TrueAudio And Mantle Support - Tom's Hardware

That Star Swarm got so big results that it makes me believe that this is just like Mantle. Biggest gains will be multi player, SLI, and CPU bound games where CPU overhead plays a bigger role

EDIT: Yup, Anandtech got better results with SLI
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7926/nvidia-releases-33750-beta-driver-offers-significant-performance-improvements

 

Crysis 3 and Hitman with SLI got a huuuge boost. Nice
I`m def downloading this driver




http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/geforce_337_50_beta_sli_performance_benchmarks.html

 

Huge gains in Titanfall. Didn't measure but I'm sticking much closer to 60FPS, except for when there's a lot of alpha heavy effects such as smoke.

680m seems to be loving this new driver. I'm happy. Will check back with other games later.

I knew I'd be CPU limited due to being on a laptop and so far the gains are impressive.

 

Hmmm new driver seems to be just like Mantle. Biggest improvement is for CPU-bound setups and games. As expected, not much improvement on our laptops compared to high-end multi-GPU desktop rigs where people have been reporting gains of up to 50% in BF3/BF4 and Hitman: Absolution on GTX 780/780 Ti SLI.

All DX11 games and GPU's (Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell) should benefit to some degree. No increases in DX9/DX10 games that I'm aware of save for Skyrim.

If you really want to test the benefits of this driver, I suggest benching your game at 720p Low or Medium to make it CPU-limited.

New Shader Cache feature is on by default in Nvidia Control Panel 3D settings and it's pretty cool. Should cut down on initial load times and in-game stuttering due to shader recompilation as well as increase GPU performance slightly. I don't know if I'm explaining that correctly, but I know Mantle does the same thing.

Hopefully the cache folder has efficient garbage collection and isn't allowed to grow too big, which may be a concern for people with small SSD's. You can always turn off Shader Cache to save space, and it will automatically disable itself if it detects that the disk is running low on space.

Anyway, I'm gonna hold out on this one until the next WHQL drops, which will contain more fixes and further performance improvements according to Nvidia spokespeople. The PlanetSide 2 black screen kernel crashes and Battlefield 2 corruption still haven't been fixed. Kudos to Nvidia though for making this driver happen and for making a lot of people very happy. It brings Mantle-like benefits to a much larger audience and range of hardware and to many more games and that is commendable. :thumbsup:

Because it's not a GTX GPU and that's just the way Nvidia is.

The -shadowplay and -gamestream unofficial workarounds still work though.

 

Well, these drivers weren't that exciting for me in the end, no real significant performance improvements in comparison to the latest whql driver.

3DMark11 was identical, except a slight increase in the 'Combined' test(CPU & GPU test).

Arkham Origins, Arkham City: no change. (surprised about this one, as was advertised for a big increase)
Metro Last Light: 4% increase in fps, and this is the game that taxes my CPU the most.
Tomb Raider: 2%
Grid 2: 2%
F1 2012: 1%
Bioshock Infinite: 1%

Skyrim quick subjective test didn't notice any improvements, GPU usage still low in some areas.
Titanfall gaming session still locked at 60fps, and still some drops in fps in some areas of some maps to high 40's, low 50's.

The most significant thing I noticed about these drivers is that game loading screens are noticeably shorter, for instance Tomb Raider seems to load the benchmark almost instantly. For me this is the only real positive about this driver, although I can't knock them for small increases in fps on some games, but it's not noticeable. I think if you had a dual core, or a really old Quad Core, then you might see some improvements with this driver, but Sandybridge quad core & up I don't think there are big gains.

 

^Thanks for the most thorough feedback we've had in this thread so far.

 

No problem!

I didn't know about the Shadow Cache feature till you mentioned it. I've lost 300MB of disk space on my little SSD since after gaming on this today, I'll keep an eye on it to see if it grows anymore. I have no idea whether this cache is saved from one gaming session, or from one day to the next, no idea on that.

 

Shader not Shadow Cache. That would be ShadowPlay.

Here are comments from one of the developers of the Shader Cache feature:

Nvidia GeForce 337.50 BETA - Discussion & Download - Page 23 - Guru3D.com Forums

Nvidia GeForce 337.50 BETA - Discussion & Download - Page 24 - Guru3D.com Forums

Nvidia GeForce 337.50 BETA - Discussion & Download - Page 25 - Guru3D.com Forums

 

Cheers for those links octiceps. So, it seems that Shader Cache will use up to 256MB of disk space per game played, and that these cache files are kept between gaming sessions. So, theoretically if you played 10 different games then you could end up having a total Shader Cache size of all games totalling 2560MB for instance. Is that how you understood the explanations of the developers?

 

No it's 256MB total for all games. Garbage collection starts if it hits that cap. Most recently used games take priority.

But don't just take my word for it. The shader cache folder is located at %TEMP%\NVIDIA Corporation\NV_Cache. Play some games and check for yourself now large the folder gets.

 

Cool, excellent, disk space is not an issue then! Yep, found it, only 108MB so far:

 

Good review Octiceps, one thing I noticed while playing Planetside 2 tonight on this driver is that core usage didn't exceed 75% whereas I nearly always see around 90% usage. But sadly I couldn't discern any improvement in FPS or overall smoothness but that shouldn't detract from the performance improvement introduced by this driver, this is more indicative of the poor state of optimization of Planetside 2.

I'm tempted to do a few benches but most are reporting negligible gains.

 

You're using Windows 7 right? I've noticed that the improved CPU scheduler in Windows 8 spreads out load more evenly among the cores, which is why I almost never exceed 50% usage on any thread in PlanetSide 2. In Windows 7 usage bunches up mostly on the first core. However this doesn't mean overall CPU usage and performance is any different between the two OSes, it just looks different in the OSD. And yes you're absolutely right, we can't expect Nvidia to make miracles happen on the driver side if SOE won't optimize its game and engine to be more multi-core aware.

Yeah I'd assume that performance gains from this driver won't be as great on notebooks since they are typically less CPU-limited than desktops. But it never hurts to bench, if only to satisfy our curious nature.

I'll update from 334.89 once the next WHQL drops since there are still some specific bug fixes I am waiting for. Then I'll probably spend some time benching, just to take Nvidia up on their claims of "up to [massive number]%" increases in such-and-such games.

Sleeping Dogs, Hitman: Absolution, BFBC2/BF3, Metro 2033, and FC3/Blood Dragon are the most CPU-intensive games I currently have. I'll bench those (at lower settings and resolution to make them more CPU-bound) along with the usual 3DMark and Unigine stuff to see just how wonderful these new drivers really are.