New GeForce drivers (295.73) are out, and they dramatically boost Skyrim and Mass Effect 3 performance.
Specifically, the Skyrim improvements are made to indoor-scene performance, high-resolution texture pack performance and Creation Kit mod performance.
Those with mid-range GTX 560 cards can now properly play Skyrim at 1920×1080, in Ultra Detail and with 16x Anisotropic Filtering.
Before now, indoor scenes at these settings ran at an essentially unplayable 27.6 frames-per-second. With the 295.73 drivers, the same scene runs at 40 frames-per-second.
For SLI GTX 560 cards, performance jumps from just over 50FPS to nearly 80FPS.
GTX 580 performance jumps from ~50FPS to ~70FPS; and SLI GTX 580 performance jumps from ~100FPS to ~120FPS.
In outdoor Skyrim environments, GTX 560 card performance (using the same settings) improves from ~45FPS to ~53FPS.
The other GeForce cards see no change above 60FPS, as performance becomes “CPU-bound”.
Also Skyrim-related in 295.73: Ambient Occlusion support is now official, and no longer in beta; and there’s a 3D crosshair for 3D Vision users.
The improvements to Mass Effect 3 come from Nvidia enabling SLI set-ups to be fully used.
One GTX 560 card runs the Mass Effect 3 demo (1920×1080) at ~80FPS. SLI GTX 560 cards run the demo at ~150FPS. Up the resolution to 2560×1440, and those numbers are ~40FPS (1 GTX 560) and ~90FPS (SLI GTX 560).
One GTX 570 card runs the Mass Effect 3 demo (1920×1080) at ~100FPS. SLI GTX 570 cards run the demo at ~190FPS. Up the resolution to 2560×1440, and those numbers are ~60FPS (1 GTX 570) and ~110FPS (SLI GTX 570)
To enable SLI, disable Vsync. “A quick and easy tweak,” explained Andrew Burnes on the Nvidia blog, “simply open C:\Users\YourUsername\Documents\BioWare\Mass Effect 3 Demo\BIOGame\Config\GamerSettings.ini, and add useVsync=False and SmoothFramerate=False to the bottom of the [SystemSettings] section, each on separate lines. Save the file and SLI will now work to its full potential.”
Edit the GamerSettings.ini file in the full Mass Effect 3 game – located at C:\Users\YourUsername\Documents\BioWare\Mass Effect 3\BIOGame\Config\ – for the same effect.
The Nvidia 295.73 drivers also add Ambient Occlusion shadowing to the Diablo 3 beta and Modern Warfare 3.
Other games that now make use of SLI GeForce graphics cards after applying these drivers include big names like Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, The Darkness 2 and Trine 2.
A bunch of games now have updated 3D Vision profiles, too.
GeForce driver 295.73 also fixes a Battlefield 3 texture corruption problem.
