NVIDIA 2010 Driver Year In Review

With Warsow, there was also a drop in performance between the 195.30 and its first of 2010 successor, but since that point, its frame-rate has been stable at approximately 140 FPS for this hardware/software configuration.

When looking at the VDPAU decoding performance with some of the driver releases this year, there is not a whole lot to look at. With all of the drivers when playing back the 1080p H.264 "Big Buck Bunny" movie, the CPU usage for the Core i5 750 with the video workload being offloaded to the 9800GTX led to just about 1% CPU usage. There was a strange spike with the NVIDIA 260.19.21 driver, but it was only briefly and is no longer present in the latest proprietary driver update.

With Enemy Territory: Quake Wars there was no major performance changes in the driver over the course of the year. In this game, which is more demanding than Warsow/OpenArena, there was also not the performance regression found between the 195.36.15 and 196.36.24 driver updates.