By Olin Coles
Manufacturer: Respawn Entertainment, Electronic Arts
Product Name: Titanfall
UPC: 649528766113 (512GB) 649528766120 (1TB)
Price As Tested: $168.99 (256GB), $336.99 (512GB), $530.99 (1TB)
Titanfall has been one of the most-anticipated games of 2014, and for a very good reason. Combining the best first-person shooter aspects of Call of Duty and Battlefield into a mech-themed FPS video game isn’t easy to pull off, but Respawn Entertainment and Electronic Arts do so with great success. Available for console and PC, gamers who want ultimate immersion and control will likely gravitate towards the desktop gaming platform. For good reason then, NVIDIA has focused a significant amount of its resources towards optimizing performance so that players can enable the best graphical quality settings possible.
The timing couldn’t be better since Microsoft recently announced the introduction of DirectX 12, an updated application programming interface that has been incredibly refined to the point that hardware performance is dramatically improved to the point that some graphics cards may soon perform like the next better model without anything more than refined DX12 software and updated drivers. To celebrate this programming break-through, NVIDIA has announced their latest GeForce drivers: Release 337.
If you’ve been living in your man-cave and Titanfall is as unknown to you as a woman’s touch, I’ve included the gameplay trailer video below to bring you up to speed:
For the sake of this article, I’m going to focus on performance improvements produced by the recently-optimized NVIDIA GeForce Forceware drivers. These newly optimized drivers are available from https://www.geforce.com/drivers. This is not an AMD Mantle vs NVIDIA Forceware comparison.
Using the video settings illustrated below, I was able to play Titanfall with every option turned up to its highest possible quality using the following hardware:
- Motherboard: ASUS P9X79 Deluxe Motherboard (Intel X79 Express)
- Processor: Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (six cores/3300 MHz)
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti (875 MHz GPU/928 MHz Boost/1750 MHz vRAM)
- System Memory: 32GB G.SKILL Ripjaws-Z DDR3-1600
- Monitor: Lenovo ThinkVision LT3053p IPS LED-Backlit 30″ LCD @ 2560×1600
- Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate Edition 64-Bit
Prior to today’s release of NVIDIA Forceware R337, the previously available version was 335.23. Many, but certainly not all GeForce users playing Titanfall, likely used R335 drivers. It’s important to use the latest drivers with your video card (true for either manufacturer), since they’re built with a particular library of game titles.
While installing the latest graphics driver may sound like something you hear repeated in an all-too-common fashion, it rings especially true with R337. You see, the optimization that comprise DirectX 12 have been revealed in this new Forceware driver, and it’s fully compatible with three generations of NVIDIA GPUs: Maxwell (700-series), Kepler (600-series), and Fermi (500-series).
Comparing NVIDIA Forceware driver version 335.23 (previous release) to Forceware 337.50 (current release), you’ll notice two different performance trends:
The results illustrated above were obtained by playing twenty rounds of Titanfall with each driver release. Since Titanfall limits the maximum framerate to 60, there was no point in reporting that metric. However, the minimum and average frame rates were particularly revealing. Unfortunately, Titanfall does not have a repeatable level or benchmark performance test, so measuring frame rates fell to repeated sessions using Fraps to capture FPS results. I ignored the five highest and lowest results in order to normalize the tests, and averaged the remaining ten results into the chart.
While the results are not absolute because they compare non-repeatable game action, they do offer a solid indication that a significant amount of free performance boost can be had by simply updating your drivers. NVIDIA is in the position to further extend the life of older (Fermi and Kepler) GPUs, while at the same time offering better performance from current-generation GeForce cards. In my case, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti was capable of 58 FPS average frame rates while playing with maximum graphics quality settings.
In summary, my own tests conclude that there are significant performance gains present in Titanfall that are delivered by using the latest Force R337 drivers when compared to all previously released editions. The drivers are free and the upgrade takes only a few minutes, so it comes highly recommend. If you’re playing Titanfall, it’s worth every extra frame your video card can provide.
The latest GeForce drivers are available from NVIDIA at https://www.geforce.com/drivers.
