Nvidia 177.39 + PhysX 8.06.12 Beta Drivers

[Slaymate]

Well I found the 177.39 and physx 8.06.12 driver this morning. It helps with the 3DMark Vantage benchmark but nothing else as far as I can see. Plus it didn't like any of my usual overclocks, hopefully it will be better optimized when it is offically released :-)

physX driver here
Download Nvidia PhysX Driver 8.06.12 Driver for Windows XP/Vista - Softpedia

177.39 driver here
Download NVIDIA Graphics Board drivers - page 1 - Softpedia

Here's my 3DMark Vantage score with the 175.16 drivers

15514 - ORB - Compare



And with the 177.39 + physX Driver

17695 - ORB - Compare



Edit:

Well I just got done trying out the Windows XP version of these drivers. The good news is , in XP I can run my system at 4 GHZ and OC my video and run 3DMark06 without any crashes or bsod. But they only provided a small boost in performance, 100 points. And I don't know if the PhysX driver was responsible or not. 3DMark06 does carry the PhysX Logo so I was really hoping it would help some. But it seems to be minimal at best. Once again, maybe when these are offically released the performance will improve.

With the 175.16 Drivers alone

22076 - ORB - Compare



With the 177.39 + PhysX 8.06.12 driver

22171 - ORB - Compare

[Gazz]

I've always been critical of Physx. The technology is great, but it's always been too expensive for what you get in return.

I am personally wondering whether to get the 9800 GTX you also seem to have or the new 4850/70. Price/performance wise ATI seems to rock: Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 In Crossfire :: TweakTown
The quality of the new linux drivers for Nvidia/amd will be a ver important factor in that decision.

All however depends on how much will be left after I drank a lot while partying at the Motogp in my hometown Assen this weekend.

[GMtm]

Why buy old gen? The new ATI card barely competes with the 9800GTX or 9800GTX+ (55nm refresh) and basically the 9800GTX is just a refresh of the 8800GTX Ultra! Things have moved on the G90 is old news and the 4850/70 has to compete on price, mianly because the GPU is impotent as its already running hotter then anything else on the market. They have to market it against yesterdays technology, because it just cannot compete with the new line of GTX280 processors!

Save your pennies or spend it on beer and motogp memorabilia at this weekends meeting! Have a nice time BTW!

Crossfire and SLI barely warrant the extra spend and even SLI with PhysX doesnt use a second GPU efficiently enough let alone a tri or quad GPU configuration. If you want to buy a card then buy the new nvidia parts and play console conversions at uHD, 8xAA and 16xAF supersampled with PhysX via GPU.

[Gazz]

Originally Posted by GMtm

Save your pennies or spend it on beer and motogp memorabilia at this weekends meeting! Have a nice time BTW!

I always come home with tons of crap. Last year I spend well over a hundred Euro on the shooting range winning Spongebob dolls. Drinking a lot compensates for the inaccuracy of those cheap pelletguns so I won a lot and tossed it. Its fun to see Assen, a city of barely 70.000 residents being overwhelmd by a mass off 120 to 150.000 people. Traffic jams however are very small since most come in groups on their motorcycles with a single large fan to move all camping stuff. I prefer the smaller Superbike races being held earlier in the year though.

Anyway, 4850 is around 160 Euro and since most great games like GTA4, MGS 4 and such are console exclusive for now (or always as with MGS4) the only reason for me to get a new card would be for Brothers in arms: hells highway since I see no reason to buy a 500-660 card for that game. I may even get it for my PS3 if the port of the console to pc turns out as poor as rainbow six vegas 2 did. Boy, was that one terrible. fra....m....e ..... rrrrrrrrrr ..... aaaa ..... tttt ........e.........

GPU s are just temp for me, as I replace them every 9 months or so. The early performance promise of the new Nvidia cards dont justify the performance/price for me.

[Richard_Rahl]

Originally Posted by Gazz

GPU s are just temp for me, as I replace them every 9 months or so. The early performance promise of the new Nvidia cards dont justify the performance/price for me.

Indeed, if you look at the prices of those cards at Komplett.nl, you sure won't see a reason to buy them.
Komplett.nl - Gainward GeForce GTX 260 896MB GDDR3, PCI-Express 2.0, 2xDVI/HDCP, 448bit
Komplett.nl - Gainward GeForce GTX 280 1GB GDDR3, PCI-Express 2.0, 2xDVI/HDCP, 512bit

[GMtm]

That is significantly less than I paid for my 8800GTX on lanch week!

[Richard_Rahl]

Originally Posted by GMtm

That is significantly less than I paid for my 8800GTX on lanch week!

Though buying such an expensive card only makes sense, if you don't replace it every 9 - 2 months.

[Gazz]

Performance-price is everything. There are enough people blindly following the high end market anyway. Compensating failing software optimisation with faster hardware is not a vicous circle I want to contribute too. Good luck wasting money for those that do, but unfortunately games like Unreal and Crysis just dont get any better with all options checked. A crappy game on a 1950 pro or on a 9800 GTX sli is still just as crap.

The money I saved over the years by not following the high end market, but by waiting a month or 2 to jump in is enormous. Nvidia, AMD both made great cards at huge costs and both had their drivers lack for around the same period, so I ended up with the complete product with optimised drivers for a better price anyway. Only card I ever purchased that still lacked proper drivers, but had huge potential is the Creative X-fi. Driver support under Xp came around, but still absolutely sucks in Vista, Linux and os-x.

3dmark and crap like that are pointless to me anyway. I have no interest in non game performance and have a 100 more points then faceless who ever on the internet is uninteresting to me. Waste of time test that could be better spend playing games or watching hd pron.

* puts on anti flame suit.