nVIDIA GeForce Drivers v372.54 Findings & Fixes

Oh, ok.

 

Here ya go. 7 left, 10 right.

http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/9817267/fs/9613991

10 barely beats 7, 7 beats 10 physics by 1.6%, 10 beats 7 combined by 1%

 

Physics isn't supposed to be so high for W7... unless they changed firestrike and I'm silly.

But yeah, something seems off about that driver. Don't suppose you're up for testing it in W10 and seeing how 10 v 10 works in these benches?

 

Stop a bit!! Fire Strike and latest 3DM Suite has bugs. There will come a new version. I've debugged for Futuremark I have been in touch with Jarlo KOKKO at Futuremark.

 

They updated the vulkan driver in this release so that's probably why Doom in vulkan is running better.

Sent from my SM-N910G using Tapatalk

 

I can run Catzilla... It does a better job than 3DMark anyway.

 

There's a clear winner.

372.54:



369.00:



Good old 365.19:



Watching the benchmarks play out, 372.54 had better frame stability than either 369 or 365.19 which had a tendency to jump around a lot more.

 

Since Futuremark broke 3DMark and I have a Vantage license, I ran all three drivers on the Extreme preset (yeah, the extreme preset actually has moments it pushes my 780 Ti under 50FPS). 369 was the winner on graphics, 365.19 was the winner on physics but 372.54 wasn't far behind 369 on graphics or 365.19 on physics. They all scored within the margin of error, not enough to turn me off 372.54 so that's what I'm going to run now.

http://www.3dmark.com/compare/3dmv/5499149/3dmv/5499153/3dmv/5499157#

 

I hope Nvidia can optimize drivers for better performance on Pascal. If 1070 get higher bench score, should also this affect 980. As 1070 is basically a higher clocked 980. Time will tell.

 

Yeah the nice thing about Pascal is that its basically Maxwell with a few tweaks and a die shrink so as nVidia optimizes Pascal drivers, Maxwell will get the benefits too.

I'm actually kind of impressed that nVidia hasn't re-nerfed Kepler. I guess once Maxwell hit the penetration target they were looking for they threw out a bone for Kepler and haven't gone back on it.

 

Fast Sync option not available for Optimus systems? Updated and it's still not appearing in control panel

 

Most likely requires dGPU to be connected to the display.

 

Yet another reason opticrap is a crazy feature

 

Another blow to Craptimus users... first G Sync and DSR now Fast Sync... oh well

 

@Mr. Fox @Phoenix @Ethrem @ajc9988 @bloodhawk @TBoneSan
New 3DMark Basic Edition Version 2.1.2969 | August 18, 2016 http://www.futuremark.com/support/downloads

Download from here http://www.futuremark.com/downloads/3DMark.exe This link will always have the latest version!!

 

When did they nerf Kepler? I don't remember this.

 

Shortly after Maxwell was released, there were a number of drivers that killed Kepler performance. Ask @Mr. Fox he would be the one who would remember the versions.

 

I don't have fast sync available on my Kepler, and I've disabled Optimus, it's running directly from the dGPU, not passing through the iGPU at all. Seems a pretty good driver, slightly higher GPU scores on 3DMark benchmarks - games do actually feel a little smoother even when previously at high frame rates too, I get the feeling this driver offers more stable framerates or perhaps better frame pacing or something.

 

Compare the minimum and average frame rates to the old driver to look for that. I forgot how to check for stopped frames exactly. I'm still not at the level I should be on video card knowledge (but I've got cpu down)...

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Literally no difference.

http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/9816953/fs/9832977

Yesterday on the left, today on the right, both at 4.6GHz.

 

I'll test when I have downloaded tonight / tomorrow. Have max 4 down, so this will take time

 

I don't think that fast sync will ever be enabled for Kepler, just Maxwell and Pascal.

 

Kepler is too old. Its a 3 years old architecture. With Pascal, big kepler's DP advantage is gone too.

 

I played monster girl quest! at 2500fps yesterday, maybe 10-15 improvement from last driver but I can't really tell /s

 

I never expected fast sync to be there. I checked for D2 and reported back.

 

Oh ok, but yeah, you are right in not expecting it to be there.

 

@Papusan

Margin of error for 3DM11 too

http://www.3dmark.com/compare/3dm11/11503640/3dm11/11506905

Although combined score got a slight boost from yesterday to today.

 

See, I've had my 780Ms since they came out, give or take about a month. The machines launched in august and I got mine in early september. I've basically installed every single new driver up until the GTA V ready 350.12 driver, at which point I started skipping them because of the crap they started doing. I have NEVER noticed reduced performance in any title, far less re-gained performance in any title.

Now, I'm not talking about benchmarks. I'm talking about video games. And it's the same point I brought up with Mr. Fox earlier too, who promptly replied that he did not care about games and only about benchmarks. And honestly, maybe benchmarks DID get nerfed; I don't bench every driver so I can't begin to say... I got bored of benching and overclocking once I realized that the heat from my room made them unusable as daily drivers. I would not be surprised, though, if they did do that to benchmarks.

However that does not affect games. The "nerf" I remember was 780s performing like 960s, and nVidia putting out a driver to "help" with this, but the reason the entire time was huge tessellation amounts being used, and the prime suspect was I believe Project CARS (which had even WORSE performance on AMD entirely). This isn't "nerfing" Kepler, mind you. This is "forced obsolescence" which they continue to do to this day. But it doesn't mean my cards worked badly in titles they worked better in. And honestly, around then I probably played more games than most people on NBR. The last couple of years I've narrowed it down a bit and it's been more Dark Souls than not, but... well... I have 2904 achievements across my steam titles, with only 5 perfect games (three of which are Dark Souls games). And I'm not really an achievement hunter except in Dark Souls where I really like 100%-ing them. So that should say how many games I've played over the years just going through.

So, I need to be shown directly that they hurt Kepler performance (at least in games) because I don't remember it. It's not excusable if they botch benchmark performances to bolster sales of new cards, yeah, but if game performance is unchanged, it's a lot less bad than the other way around (since gaming is the primary intention of graphics cards) and definitely better than if they botched both performances.

As far as Fast Sync goes, Fermi and up can use it via nVidia Inspector. But it does not work in SLI (even in Pascal).

 

Well when it comes to my personal experience, there were way too many unstable drivers. Lots of TDRs. I stayed on 347.88 until I got my 980Ms because of it.

 

So, it seems that this driver package is decent enough to use on Maxwell. I mean, I'm bound to see some decent consistent results, at least considering I'm still running 350.12 on my GTX 980, which I wasn't overly concerned with updating since I'm still working on my backlog

 

Unfortunately I have to blame your 880Ms. Mine had no issues, and friends with Kepler cards had no issues (two friends were using 680s and one had SLI 780Tis at the time). Also I know that many here had no 780M issues, and 680Ms handled really well as well. I also have a friend @Plur who had an 870M under my recommendation to "not cheap out" on a machine (ironically its board died in about 1.5 years) and she had no issues as well, and even kept it generally overclocked most of the time. Also Octiceps had 650M SLI the whole time, and has also agreed that he has never lost performance in any games.

Excepting 880M users (which I fully admit and agree was a huge problem card for just about everybody not using a 4GB model) I've never heard of or seen Kepler cards directly LOSE performance in any set of games. Like I said, benchmarks are not a consideration for me.

 

My 780 Ti was crashing too. And when the 36x branch came into existence my stock 1072Mhz boost suddenly jumped to 1150MHz and has remained there since so in my case, nVidia actually DID give me more performance lol.

 

Probably hoping it would shorten the life span on your card!

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If anything its more stable than it ever was which is hilarious. Stock its 1006MHz/1072MHz which is already overclocked significantly from the 875/928 reference card but now its 1006/1150MHz and it actually does boost at least to 1100 99% of the time without adjusting the power target.

 

Whats really funny is that it does the boost even though GPU-Z still reports it as 1072MHz boost when both the GPU-Z log in Logviewer and GPU-Z itself show the increase in the max clock state.

 

....

YOU'RE MURPHY. NOT EVEN MURPHY'S LAW. MURPHY HIMSELF. I HAVE NO OTHER EXPLANATIONS. D=.

 

If I was in a regular chair and not an armchair, I would have fallen over. +rep LOL

 

I agree, I always install new drivers, and I benchmark them with Synthetic 3DMark stuff and also game benchmarks, and there's no difference between drivers, except for one or two drivers where NVidia have made small 'step change' peformance improvements, like there was a driver a while back (337.50 Beta Enhanced DX11 Driver), and that saw small improvements accross the board with those gains being held in all subsequently released drivers. Not seen any nerfing in drivers, and I actually measure the performance of each of them. I do say though that this latest driver seems to produce a smoother feel on the screen though, even if synthetics & game benchmarks are showing the same numbers (frame pacing perhaps).

 

well,seems stable enough from the reports here, i think we got a successor for 365.19

Sent from my Huawei Mate 8 NXT-AL10

 

From watching the framerate in 3 tests on Catzilla its safe to say that these drivers are indeed much smoother than past drivers which tend to bounce all over the place. The only thing I can figure is that they optimized texture streaming somehow because the scene transitions are what usually take a massive hit and they really didn't.

Definitely better than 365.19

 

Can you try these please: nVIDIA GeForce Drivers v10.18.13.6883

They are the latest ones from Clevo stolen from the P870DM3 drivers. They seemed stable to me and they also include the Miracast Audio Driver which the normal nVIDIA Drivers never include if that makes any difference

 

Yeah I'll try them later today.

372.54 has Miracast audio. All website downloads except betas have it. Not that it's used for anything except nVidia Shield tablets.

 

nope, they have HD Audio Driver not Miracast

 

Hmm maybe it's different in the 10 releases but either way Miracast is useless. Could have sworn 372.54 had Miracast but I just woke up so give me some time lol.

 

s

strange, I never saw the Miracast Driver in any driver other than the ones provided by Clevo

 

To the people who are saying it's smoother and such, can you check in windowed mode for me? I doubt most of you play in windowed mode and whatnot, but you know. I'm just interested.

Also, can anyone check if CPU temps are different between 365.19 and 372.54? 362.00 DID increase my CPU temps a large amount for no real reason, and I kind of don't want to go back to a similar driver.

In Mr. Fox's modded drivers in the past I had Miracast audio. But I found it pointless as I couldn't figure out what it was for.

 

Haven't tested drivers yet but I assume borderless Fullscreen could also be eligible for testing given how it's effectively windowed mode all the same. Reason for that mode is how alt tabbing is noticeably quicker due to how some screens are oddly sluggish at switching between Fullscreen and windowed/desktop, even if transitioning between the same resolutions.

 

Temps are lower with 372.54 for sure. Highest I've seen my CPU go was 80C after back to back runs with Catzilla and that's with my H100i on silent mode so the fans don't kick in until 85C.

As for windowed mode, no idea, I wouldn't even have a point of reference.

 

372.54 has fixed all TDRs (on my desktop) and any other issues I've had on my laptop and desktop. This may be my new all time favourite driver, I think I like it even more than 362.00.

 

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Okay, I'll install them before I reboot next time I guess.

That'll probably be the next time I get ready to clean my stuff.