The Evolution Of NVIDIA's Kepler Driver Performance

After publishing last week a look at AMD's Catalyst Evolution For The Radeon HD 7000 Series, here's a similar set of benchmarks to see how the NVIDIA graphics driver performance has changed for the GeForce GTX 680 "Kepler" graphics card since its inception.

The focus of this testing is quite simple and is just about looking for any driver performance improvements or regressions since the launch of the NVIDIA GeForce 600 series Kepler hardware earlier this year, which has had NVIDIA Linux binary driver support from the start.

Testing happened on the same Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge system with Ubuntu Linux as was used for the recent Radeon HD 7950 Catalyst benchmarks. The NVIDIA driver benchmarks included the 295.33, 295.40, 295.49, 295.59, and 302.17 driver releases. The latest NVIDIA 304.22 driver was not benchmarked since it was released after this testing had already been completed.

All benchmarking was handled by the Phoronix Test Suite.