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NVIDIA GeForce R300 beta drivers up for grabs, brings FXAA...

by Alistair Lowe on 10 April 2012, 09:47

Tags: NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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When we first introduced our readers to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680, we also introduced some impressive new driver features from the firm, namely, the new, high-speed FXAA algorithm, Adaptive VSync and Frame Rate Target.

Just yesterday, NVIDIA announced that all of these new features, plus the usual round of performance enhancements, were now available in its first general beta release of the R300 driver series, with v301.24 now up for grabs on the firm's website. This new release is compatible back to 8xxx series graphics cards and supports Windows Vista and 7.

NVIDIA FXAA

For those who require their memory jogging, FXAA is a new shader-based anti-aliasing algorithm that typically offers 60 per cent greater performance than MSAA whilst achieving equivalent or superior quality.

Adaptive VSync allows cards to turn off VSynch when the frame-rate is likely to drop below 60/30fps; VSync exists to ensure that an entire frame reaches the screen in a single refresh, preventing 'tearing' artefacts, however if the GPU is pressed, the frame rate will take a sudden drop to half of the target frame-rate i.e. 60fps down to 30fps. Adaptive VSync prevents this issue by turning Vsynch off during these times, favouring tearing artefacts over a sudden loss of frames.

Frame Rate Target can be useful in three ways; the first, setting a frame cap of 30fps, enabling support for some older games that do not function correctly at higher frame-rates. Secondly, setting a target around the average expected frame-rate can result in reduced judder caused by a large fluctuation in the frame-rate of a game. Finally, setting a target can help to reduce GPU power consumption, though how effective this will be varies on specific GPU architectures.

For NVIDIA Surround cards, support for a fourth 'Accessory' display has been added, along with single-screen maximisation, central Windows Taskbar alignment, bezel peeking and full single-screen acceleration whilst running multiple monitors.

NVIDIA GeForce R300 performance gains

The new release adds more SLI and 3D Vision profiles and sees performance boosts across the line, with Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim showing gains of up to 23 per cent, with specific note to improvements in SLI performance in this release. A sample of popular games running on the mainstream 560Ti saw performance boosts ranging from 3.52 per cent up to 11.87 per cent.

Head of over to the GeForce website for a full list of changes and detailed introductions to the new features.



HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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The new adaptive vsync is quite awesome.
if you set these in the nvidia panel does it override any in game settings?
Great to see that they've rolled this out to to older cards
The adaptive vsync works fine on older cards.

The new AA….I am not sure yet (testing bit-by-bit with BF3)
Unfortunately, Adaptative V-Sync Half-Refresh is broken, FXAA is delivering lower performance than 4x MSAA on different setups and Frame Rate Target is missing altogether. I should add that there have been some rather nasty reports of the driver installer mucking up things with PhysX, CUDA and DirectCompute support vanishing altogether, TDRs and more crashes on 3D apps.

While Adaptative V-Sync and the performance improvements on specific scenarios is nice, it's definitely not worth the plethora of issues that these drivers have. I'm waiting and hoping the next WHQL driver set will behave properly.
Pee poor drivers, why are they even released…Oh yes its beta drivers, my bad.

So far after installing, no performance improvements on my gtx460 as far as i can tell BUT and this is a major but, all my games are borked, text is ultra hard to read to a point it looks as if text is read at a 800x600 res on a crt… its that bad :( and every time i exit a game the drivers claim to have crashed and need restarting.

Going back to the last certified release as i need to be able to read text!