After a couple of quickies everyone would agree that we’re finally ready for some harder lovin’ and with Nvidia pitching in that’s about to happen today.
Here to help pleasure our dirty minds and dusty graphics cards are two GeForce drivers – Nvidia’s last official 178 release, the GeForce 178.24 and the second official Big Bang II package coming straight from Santa Clara, the GeForce 180.43 beta. To test out the Big Shot Big Bang driver against its predecessor we’re using a system equipped with a stock clocked (3.0 GHz) Core 2 Duo E8400 processor, 4GB of RAM, a MSI X48 motherboard, a stock GeForce 9800 GTX and a few SATA hard drives.
The software package called to arms for the driver rumble includes Microsoft’s Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 32bit, the 8.10.13 PhysX software and a few test applications – Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage, Capcom’s Devil May Cry 4, Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2, Crytek’s Crysis Warhead, Valve’s Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Epic’s Unreal Tournament III, the last three being paired up with the appropriate HardwareOC benchmark which can be found at hocbench.com and 2Manydownloads.
