Tonight I was prompted to download the new NVIDIA 340.43 Beta driver. The description mentioned adding support for the recently released Battlefield: Hardline Beta. I’ve been running with the stable driver 337.88 since installing Hardline, and all has been fine. Performance has been OK really, except for some weird animations (dead bodies twitch on the floor) when people die, or when you get too close to wall (the wall turns transparent), but me being me I decided to compare the two drivers.

I’ll note, I was excited to make this comparison because of the recent 337.88 series driver. It got quite a lot of media coverage because of its 10% performance improvement over its predecessor. 340.43 most likely wont be another 10%, but I’m curious.

Click this graph for a bigger view. It’s better on the eyes!

What’s interesting here is the lack of raw performance, but the honing in on consistency. The new driver provides more stable performance with fewer spikes. It does however, add a few big drops though. Like the one at 145 sec. Not sure what was going on in the game, but the new driver didn’t seem to like it. The previous spike at 280 seconds is gone. This was, I think, is when the crane falls. The new driver make better work out of that scene.