NVIDIA has revealed on their official GeForce website that the upcoming GeForce 337.50 BETA driver would launch on 7th April. The GeForce 337.50 BETA driver would bring several DirectX Optimizations that will help significantly boost performance of GeForce GPUs based graphics cards.

NVIDIA GeForce 337.50 Driver - 64-Bit Download Link(Will Be Available on 7th April)

NVIDIA GeForce 337.50 BETA Driver Available On 7th April

Now, what's really interesting about the GeForce 337.50 BETA driver is that it is specifically geared to enhance performance in DirectX 11 API.The GeForce 337.50 BETA drivertakes a well known approach to solve processor overhead without moving to a new API (DX12 for example).The approachis called ‘Tiled Resources’ and a weak variant of the same is also used in Mantle API. This will also grant Developers more control at the Assembly level which will allow them to tweak performance for specific set of hardware. Just like AMD's Mantle API which runs on GCN based graphics unit, the GeForce 337.50 Driver will improve performance of GeForce 500 series and up without the need of a separate API.

With several gaming titles already running on DirectX 11 API, we can see performance enhancements through a wide variety of games as opposed to AMD's Mantle which currently only enables on two titles (Battlefield 4 and Thief). The Mantle API is said to be featured across several upcoming gaming titles but as long as there's DirectX 11 in the game, NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards will get the same if not better performance enhancements. This does show that both GPU manufacturer's are gearing up with their own experiments for the upcoming DirectX 12 API which will enable all the low-level CPU overhead optimizations and additional features for next generation graphics hardware. This will give these companies ample time to develop hardware which can be utilized to the core by developers and programmers to effectively utilize the hardware capabilities.

A few charts were presented during GDC 2014 by NVIDIA which show the kind of performance enhancements to expect from the GeForce 337.50 driver.The numbers that were released showed a decrease in CPU overhead by a factor of about 4.This should result in aperformanceincrease ofleaps and boundsin multi-gpu configurations. Of course the fact remains, that if these charts were rigged or manipulated by Nvidia in any way, we will find out soon enough. When thedriveris released and third party benchmarks emerge, it will become clear whether Nvidia was true to it word or not.

Now the first benchmark Star Swarm has a normal axis ranging from 0 till 80 and we see continuouslyincreasing performancewith the NVIDIA Counterparts. We see that the R9 290X gets a massive bumpin performancewith Mantle API but that performance is neared by the R334 Driver enabled GTX 780 Ti and overtaken by the up coming Driver enabled GTX 780 Ti.

The performancegap is pretty significant seeing that this is just a Soft update of the same card. Now the Thief benchmark have a skewed axis starting from 48 fps till 60 fps, sothe performanceincrease is lower (percent wise) than star swarm. However we can see that the GTX 780 Ti overtakes the Mantle Equipped R9 290X once again in terms of performance, with this mysterious new update. This second slide shows some impressive improvements of API features that once again come in this new upcomingdriver update. As said, we want to believe the charts are true but we will just wait till launch tomorrow to see if the driver live up to its claim. Following are some performance numbers from the NVIDIA GeForce webpage:

New in GeForce 337.50 Beta drivers

Performance- Introduces key DirectX optimizations which result in reduced game-loading times and significant performance increases across a wide variety of games.Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration. Here are some examples of measured gains versus the previous 335.23 WHQL driver:

GeForce GTX 700 Series (Single GPU):

Up to 64% in Total War: Rome IIUp to 25% in The Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimUp to 23% in Sleeping DogsUp to 21% in Star SwarmUp to 15% in Batman: Arkham OriginsUp to 10% in Metro: Last LightUp to 8% in Hitman AbsolutionUp to 7% in Sniper Elite V2Up to 6% in Tomb RaiderUp to 6% in F1 2013

GeForce GTX 700 Series (SLI):

Up to 71% in Total War: Rome IIUp to 53% in Sniper Elite V2Up to 45% in Aliens vs. PredatorUp to 31% in Sleeping DogsUp to 20% in CoD: Black Ops 2Up to 10% in Hitman AbsolutionUp to 9% in F1 2013Up to 7% in Far Cry 3Up to 6% in Metro: Last LightUp to 6% in Batman: Arkham Origins