Nvidia has served up another hearty helping of graphics driver improvements. The GeForce 310.70 drivers are ready to download now. These WHQL-candidate BETA drivers offer performance improvements in a wide range of popular modern games titles such as Far Cry 3, Hitman: Absolution, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Battlefields 3, Civilisation V and Assassin's Creed III.
The headlining improvement provided by the new GeForce 310.70 drivers is a 37 per cent performance boost when playing Far Cry 3 on a GeForce GTX 690 graphics card (see the chart above). In addition to this significant frame rate bump a further 20 games are listed by Nvidia with their before and after frame rate improvements. Nvidia used the GeForce GTX 680 as a performance improvement benchmark in its full list of frame rate improvements “performance improvements benefit all GeForce GTX graphics cards, though obviously to varying degrees. We would of course love to show how our optimizations benefit the entire range of GeForce GTX GPUs, but sadly this is unfeasible given the number of benchmarks required,” explained Andrew Burnes in the Nvidia new driver announcement. However the firm also supplied a smaller list showing performance improvements using the more mainstream GeForce GTX 660.
In addition to the frame rate boosts offered by the new GeForce 310.70 drivers there are a couple of quality options such as TXAA anti-aliasing added to Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Assassin's Creed III. A shadow flickering issue was fixed within, again, Assassin’s Creed III and other commonly reported issues in games including Battlefield 3, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Hitman: Absolution and Final Fantasy XIV Online were fixed.
Nvidia noted that new SLI profiles to increase multi-GPU performance have been added for these games: Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Hawken, Hitman: Absolution, Natural Selection 2, Primal Carnage and Far Cry 3. Read more and get the full details (release notes PDF) from the horse’s mouth here or if you prefer action to words just go and download the new WHQL-candidate GeForce 310.70 BETA drivers here.
