NVIDIA Driver Optimizations

In the main testing in this review, you’ll remember we had both the Trilinear and Anisotropic Filtering optimization in the NVIDIA driver control panel turned OFF.

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We also wanted to see how much of a difference these optimizations made in performance on the eVGA e-GeForce 6800 GT, so we enabled them to run a few benchmarks that you can see below.

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Our testing shows there to be a small increase in gaming performance with these optimizations enabled.  In Unreal Tournament 2004, we see a 2-3 FPS gain in all the categories though it still does not really make the 16×12 resolution playable with 4xAA and 8xAF turned on.  In BF:V the maximum FPS sees a nice gain of 14 frames but again the average is just about 3 FPS faster with the optimizations.  Far Cry sees the least improvement with the optimizations, with not even 2 FPS gained on the average framerate.

We turned these off initially in order to get the very best image quality out of the NVIDIA cards we could, but because these optimizations are enabled by default in the new driver releases, we thought showing you how they affect performance was pertinent.  How they affect image quality is still up in the air as most of the time the optimizations are not really noticeable, though there have been a very limited number of instances where they have been.

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