Titanfall Performance Boost: NVIDIA R337 Drivers

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:

TItanfall and NVIDIA GeForce graphics

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 http://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:

Intel X79 Express Test System

• 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