GeForce GTX 480 and release 256: performances (page 1: Innovations)

Initially announced for April, release 256 of the NVIDIA drivers has finally arrived with the 257.15 beta drivers. We did of course want to see if they bring any significant performance improvements for the GeForce GTX 400s.

New features

Although NVIDIA has announced performance gains in numerous games, the manufacturer says that the main aim with this major new family of drivers is to serve as the basis for new features. Of course moving from the 197.x drivers to the 257.x drivers is also a communications weapon for NVIDIA: firstly, before their arrival they left open the idea that significantly improved drivers were on the way to improve GeForce GTX 400 performance; secondly once available, the drivers are another reason for talking up these cards and showing NVIDIA off in a better light.

Here’s a summary of the main innovations:

- Support for Blu-ray 3D playback acceleration for cards based on the GT215s, GT216s, GT218s and GF100s.
- Redesign of SLI and PhysX parameters page. It is now clearer and allows you to configure multi-GPU systems with more precision.
- Addition of SLIAA 64x and 96x (SLI and tri-SLI) modes.
- Addition of higher quality mode for ambient occlusion.
- OpenGL 4.0 support.
- Support for CUDA 3.1 SDK (not yet public).
- Removal of numerous now useless 3D options such as HDR Lighting, the main use of which was to cheat 3Dmark with entry level GeForces.
- Addition of a page dedicated to ECC support (disabled by default) for the Teslas and forthcoming Quadros based on the GF100.

Note that Surround and 3D Vision Surround are not included in this first version of Release 256. NVIDIA is now talking about a second version planned for the end of June, which means a total delay of 2 months more for these features than was initially promised by NVIDIA. The reason for this lies in the complexity of the introduction of these multi-screen technologies and support for a maximum of games. NVIDIA was taken by surprise by AMD’s Eyefinity and developing an equivalent response is taking time. Of course, a makeshift solution from NVIDIA wouldn’t have been well received. Remember that to use Surround you will need a multi-GPU system as each GeForce only supports 2 video outs, which does of course complicate the task.

Before moving on to performance levels, we should say that these drivers are available for Windows XP, Vista and 7 and are compatible with GeForce 6s and later as well as for mobile GPUs as of the GeForce 8Ms. NVIDIA says that the 256 family of drivers will be released with version numbers from 256.xx to 259.xx.