Not long ago we looked at AMD's Catalyst Omega driver release, the first major driver package for some time and heralded by AMD themselves as a big step forward in terms of driver stability and performance. In scant few months between it and a viable previous release driver compatible with our test system AMD were able to squeeze out substantial performance despite the relatively age of the GCN architecture. Today we?re putting Nvidia's driver package through similar paces, primarily to see just how far they?ve come in optimising for their new Maxwell architecture since September's hardware launch.

Nvidia are well known for an extremely fast turnaround time for new drivers, even WHQL-certified drivers. Game Day drivers ? GeForce 347.52, the drivers we're focusing on, among them ? tend to be issued on the day of every major game release. AMD by contrast tend to rely on progressive beta candidates before rolling in changes to a major update later in the month. By working closely with game developers Nvidia tend to have access to game release candidates early on, allowing their driver team some lead time prior to release to smooth out any problems.