NVIDIA ForceWare 158.45 DirectX 10 performance

Since the launch of ATI's Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics board, heralding the true beginning of the DirectX 10 era thanks to both major graphics IHVs having high-end boards supporting such functionality, we've seen what has been a really rather impressive flurry of DirectX 10 content making itself available, perhaps besting even the uptake of DirectX 9 by game developers.

First out of the door was Capcom's PC version of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, which saw a demo of said title released in both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 flavours.  Then we had the version 1.70 patch for the ever-popular World War II real-time strategy game Company of Heroes, which brought a nice smattering of DirectX 10 capabilities to the game engine.  Finally, and most recently, the DirectX 10 benchmark for Call of Juarez was released in its final iteration to the public, giving us plenty of eye candy to drool over.

With the release of the Company of Heroes 1.70 patch at the end of last month, we were also treated to a new beta Windows Vista driver set from NVIDIA, promising impressive performance improvements to coincide with the release of that update.  While better performance in Company of Heroes is a given, what of the other recently released DirectX 10 content?  In this article, we'll be putting this recently released ForceWare 158.45 beta to the test under Windows Vista, using a trusty GeForce 8800 GTS.

Test setup

All of today's testing has been run on the following:

- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
- 2GB Corsair PC6400 DDR2 RAM
- MSI 975X Platinum PowerUP Edition (Socket LGA 775, PCI Express)
- 250GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 hard drive
- Pioneer 16x DVD-ROM
- NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
- Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W power supply
- Windows Vista Home Premium (64-bit Edition)

The following drivers were used:

- NVIDIA ForceWare 158.18 WHQL
- NVIDIA ForceWare 158.45 Beta

The drivers High Quality texture filtering mode was enabled for all real-world game testing.

Benchmarks used

Below is a list of all the tests and applications used for benchmarking:

- Company of Heroes (Version 1.70, DirectX 10)
Built-in timedemo, application AA, control panel AF
FRAPS, application AA/AF
- Lost Planet: Extreme Condition demo (DirectX 10)
Built-in timedemo, application AA/AF
- Call of Juarez demo
Built-in timedemo, application AA, control panel AF