Yesterday, Nvidia posted a new beta driver for their GeForce graphics cards, promising significant performance improvements over previous drivers. Through DirectX optimizations in the new GeForce 337.50 beta driver, Nvidia claims performance gains of up to 64% in single-GPU configurations, and up to 71% in SLI configurations, compared to R334-branch drivers.
In Nvidia's testing of some specific games with a GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics card, the company found performance in Battlefield 4 was 12% higher under the 337.50 driver, and 16% higher in StarSwarm. Nvidia is boasting that the 780 Ti outperforms the AMD Radeon R9 290X with Mantle enabled in these circumstances, so there's no hiding the motives behind the optimizations.
It appears Nvidia has been reducing CPU overhead as part of the improvements targeting DirectX, but they aren't ready to share specifics on how the gains were achieved. More details can be expected when the driver comes out of beta.
The latest set of performance improvements in the 337.50 beta are leading up to wider gains in DirectX 12. The updated graphics API, which was announced at GDC 2014, is set to bring reduced CPU overhead and low-level improvements to old and new hardware towards the end of 2015.
To grab the latest GeForce beta driver, you can either head to our driver download section, or let the GeForce Experience application update it for you.