Nvidia Takes on Mantle with Enhanced DX11 Driver
Nvidia releases enhanced DX11 drivers
Today Nvidia is releasing an all-new driver for customers of its Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell GPUs that it claims offers significant performance gains in DirectX11 titles. It told us this driver is reminiscent of its "Detonator" drivers from back in the day, and it's claiming the driver can provide "up to 64 percent faster single GPU performance" as well as "up to 71 percent faster SLI performance."
The Driver
The driver is labeled 337.50 Beta and it's an "optimized DX driver." Interestingly, no details were given by Nvidia on what specifically was optimized or different from previous drivers, which is a departure for Team Green. Usually big updates like this include a white paper of some sorts, but for this particular update it just provided general terms like "Dramatic Improvements." This is clearly a driver aimed at AMD's Mantle though, as the majority of the presentation we received from Nvidia pointed out how a DX11 GeForce card and this new driver is faster than AMD cards running Mantle. It then provided these specific numbers comparing a GeForce 780 Ti vs. an R9 290X on Mantle:
StarSwarm - 16% faster
Battlefield 4 - 12% faster
Thief - 7% faster
In other words, Nvidia is saying, "We don't need a custom Nvidia-specific API, we can optimize DX11, which a lot of games already support," unlike Mantle which is only supported in StarSwarm, Thief, and Battlefield 4 currently. Here's one of the slides Nvidia offered to us:

In addition to being faster than AMD's Mantle API, Nvidia is also claiming that its driver improves SLI performance. Since a CPU can easily bottleneck a multi-GPU setup this makes sense, but let's look at the numbers Nvidia has provided.
As you recall, earlier Nvidia claimed "up to 71 percent faster SLI performance." In the accompanying chart, it showed one game receiving that level of improvement, and that game is Total War: Rome 2. On the other end of the spectrum is Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which received around 15-20 percent improvement. Here is that slide:

Unfortunately, none of those games are in our testing suite. In anticipation of this, and taking pains to hit AMD where it hurts, it also presented a slide showing multi-GPU scaling in Thief, which is now AMD's poster child for Mantle and TrueAudio support. Here is that slide:

But that's not all. Nvidia also pointed out that this driver is just plain faster in many titles, including the same ones it pointed to before, such as CoD: BLOPS2, Sleeping Dogs, Alien vs. Predator, Total War: Rome 2, and finally Sniper Elite v2.
None of these games are in our testing suite, so hit the next page to see how the new driver fared on two different test systems, and on dual GTX 780 cards in SLI.