As some here are no doubt already aware, not long ago, after years of neglect on the subject, nVidia finally started putting drivers for mobile GeForce cards directly on their site. They were always on top of it with desktop drivers, but for mobile, it used to be we needed to rely on third party sites like laptopvideo2go.com for (unofficial) updates. But now nVidia does it officially themselves, which is great.
Today, I had a little time to play around, so I updated my laptop (dual 8700M GT) from the old 179 series drivers to nVidia's latest, 185.85. The results in SL are impressive, and more than a little surprising.
My frame rate on the mainland has almost doubled. I'm getting a solid 25-30 FPS in built up areas, where I used to get 15-20. That's with all custom graphics settings maxed, except for draw distance of 256, and with anisotropic filtering enabled, and 4x antialisaing. That's nowhere near the performance I get on my desktop (dual 8800 GTX), with everything maxed, including 512 draw and 16x AA, but for a laptop, it's pretty damned good.
That was the impressive part. Now here's the surprising part. On empty islands, while staring out at the sea, my frame rate is exactly the same, 25-30. It does not seem to fluctuate at all in relation to content. I've never seen such consistent performance on any machine, ever.
I really have to wonder what this new driver is doing under the hood, to produce such unbelievably steady FPS. More importantly, I'd love to know what other people are experiencing with this same driver. It would be interesting to see if it just happens to be unusually well suited for my specific hardware configuration, or if it really is the most solidly SL-friendly nVidia driver to date.
Anyone care to give it a whirl, and report back?
ETA: I almost forgot. Here are my relevant system specs:
ASUS G70S-A1
Intel Core2 Duo T9500 2.6 GHz
Dual nVidia GeForce 8700M GT 512MB
4GB DDR2 667 RAM
Dual Seagate Momentus Hard Drive 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s
Vista Ultimate x64
Complete specs can be viewed at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220364