14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices didn't get to be unique for long. NVIDIA has already responded to the new tactic, the one involving a special new driver and free game bundles.
The other day, AMD announced the Catalyst 12.11 Beta drivers, which promise a performance increase of 15% in games (for Radeon HD 7000 graphics cards) and an advantage of up to 20% over NVIDIA.
AMD did offer the 12.10 WHQL drivers, which updates the other Radeon series adapters as well, but 12.11 (Never Settle) is the one that got lauded by the company more.
In the end, though, the scales didn't stay unbalanced for long. NVIDIA already has its own driver out, claiming a 15% game performance improvement on GeForce 600.
And this is what, some may say, shows that the scales haven't actually been balanced. The games that will benefit from the GeForce Display Driver 310.33 driver are completely different from those that AMD listed.
While AMD's Radeon HD 7000 will excel in Medal of Honor: Warfighter, DiRT Showdown, Battlefield 3 and Sleeping Dogs, NVIDIA's boards will shine in Batman: Arkham City, Civilization V, Dragon Age 2, Skyrim and The Chronicles of Riddik: Assault on Dark Athena.
The charts below show the difference between systems featuring the 306.89 WHQL driver and the 310.33 Beta.
In addition to all the above, the Santa Clara, California-based graphics card developer updated and/or added some SLI and 3D Vision game profiles.
Finally, some bug fixes are included. Gradual performance drop on Quad SLI systems and lack of MSAA anti-aliasing in Diablo III will no longer happen, for instance.
NVIDIA GeForce Display Driver 310.33 Beta for XP
NVIDIA GeForce Display Driver 310.33 Beta for XP64
NVIDIA GeForce Display Driver 310.33 Beta
NVIDIA GeForce Display Driver 310.33 Beta x64
