Conclusion

As the results show, the new ForceWare 174.16 driver isn't as great as it appears to be. It is, in fact, slower than the older ForceWare 169.28 in most situations. It was particularly bad in Crysis, where it was 12.5% to 15% slower than the older ForceWare 169.28 driver.

At this moment, we cannot be certain if the DirectX 10 problem is merely limited to our testbed but a far more widespread problem. But coupled with the fact that this driver sucks as far as GeForce 8 cards go, there's no real reason for you to hack it to run with your GeForce 8 series graphics card.

In fact, we think it would be a better idea instead for users of the GeForce 9600 GT to hack the older ForceWare 169 driver to run with their cards. We have not tried it yet, so we are not sure if the older driver can even work with the new card. For certain, some new features like HybridPower will not work. But if you can get it to work and you don't mind living without the GeForce 9600 GT-specific features, you could benefit from better performance.

Questions & Comments

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