Nvidia Beta/Standard drivers?

Hi everyone,
I was curious as to what people are finding out for performance between the beta and the standard drivers. I've been on the latest beta drivers for a couple months now, so I haven't taken the time to compare. I was wondering since I saw a similar topic regarding Skyrim, and the user reported higher framerates with the standard driver over the beta.

I play games such as Skyrim, Dirt3, ArmA2, Battlefield 3, and Assassin's Creed Revelations. What would you recommend?

Thanks!

 

The main difference between beta and standard drivers is that the standard are wqhl-certified, aka theyve been tested by microsoft to be compatible with windows, so i wouldn't really pay attention to whether a driver is beta or not.

Now the question is which version of drivers runs best for the games. Truth is that different drivers work best with different video cards and computers, so when it comes to having a best driver, it will depend mainly on your system and which games you run on it. For me, the 290.53 works best with BF3.

Also, in my experience with drivers, i would just go with the latest (newly released) drivers as they will contain optimizations or fixes for recent games like BF3 or Skyrim. Hopping between all sorts of drivers will be relatively frustrating trying to find the optimal drivers since most of the time, the performance between different drivers are often negligible and you wouldnt notice unless you were recording the FPS.

 

Thanks for the quick response!

Forgot to mention that I'm running an XPS 15 L502x with a GT540m, but I guess it doesn't make that much of a difference with different driver versions, as you mentioned. I'm currently on 290.53 also, I'll probably stick with it also.

 

i tried the 290 beta, the one with 25% skyrim boost, it was slow! so i went back to 286, now i have a nagging feeling the game might have decided to boot into intel hd.

 

Oh, really? I looked at a Skyrim thread a few pages back and used their recommended settings, and I'm getting pretty smooth frames with the 290.53 driver. They're not at the flawless 60 mark but I'd guess around 30-40 outside and higher inside caves, and some hiccups when walking through fog/smoke.

 

It shouldn't be: Start the game, alt tab to go back to desk top, go to lower left of taskbar and left click the GPU activity icon and you will know.

 

30-40 is slowly!! its just not good enough. i'm playing on medium settings with decal turned on to medium and native res. its running 60fps pretty constant, few dips when in whiterun. i want to enable to AA though

 

30-40 isn't too bad, but I didn't realize how bad it was until after playing some games over winter break on my gaming rig at home then coming back to my lappy to see the difference hehe

I'm running at 720p in Skyrim right now with everything on high except shadows are on low, AA is off but FXAA is enabled. I'm getting much better frames now! Closer to the 60fps mark, quite consistently too.

 

yeah thats what i get,

720p
high textures
medium radial blur
shadows low
medium decal
aa/af off
fxaa on

45-60fps
takes off fxaa and its pretty much 60 everywhere but i like the extra jazz, if it gets skippy at some point i'll just turn it off. yet to try the 1.4 beta which is supposed to be a massive optimisation boost though.