nVidia GTX 480 Drivers

[Ualaa]

Reposting...

Wouldn't hurt to check which driver you're using, if you have an nVidia GTX 480.

Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm : Nvidia's GeForce GTX 480: Before And After A Year Of Driver Updates

[Tim]

Oh WoW, this sounds like a great idea to upgrade my 2x 480 drivers since they are pretty darn old.

Thanks Ualaa, I'll try and document some before and afters.

[Ualaa]

Their original drivers run better than their newer drivers for the card.
Each new generation of driver is worse than the previous, at least for warcraft.

That is very counter-intuitive.

[Tim]

Oh its slower, hmm. Now I have a sad face.

I read that they were fixing it in the next release.

By the way, I've ran WoW on DX11 as well as DX9. The graphical different was not noticable at all. I didn't see anything that looked better. But the performance difference was huge. DX9 is so much more smooth for WoW than DX11.

I guess this is because WoW in itself was written for DX9, not DX11, and running it in DX11 is sorta not originally intended.

What are your experiences with DX11 v DX9 in WoW?

[xartin]

something I recently noticed with wow and DX11 is the config cvar no longer works for enabling DX11 in world of warcraft..

only the "target" flag works now for reasons unknown to me.

the only way I could get DX11 to work is by creating a new shortcut with the following syntax...

"F:\World of Warcraft\Wow.exe" -d3d11

On an off topic pwnboxer will not allow creating executable targets with the above "-cvar" syntax meaning no DX11 when launching with pwnboxer =[

if I try to load with the config.wtf cvar that used to enable DX11 wow loads in DX9 mode with only shader model 3 or worse which in my recent tests had a moderate impact on overall frame rates. with DX11 enabled I usually get over 100fps with the 267.91 nvidia driver with my sli 480GTX setup with 16x antrosopic 1x multisample and everything else on ultra or max settings.

The gx.log file in the world of warcraft install directory logs folder should show the following if DX11 is working. note that shader model 5 and related graphics setting are recognized.

4/8 16:04:02.520 CGxDevice:3d9AdapterID(): RET: 1, VID: 10de, DID: 6c0, DVER: 80011.c1a02
4/8 16:04:02.520 CGxDevice:3d11AdapterInfer(): D3D11 - RET: 1, DID: 3
4/8 16:04:02.520 ConsoleDetectDetectHardware():
4/8 16:04:02.520 cpuIdx: 1
4/8 16:04:02.520 videoID: 693
4/8 16:04:02.520 soundIdx: 0
4/8 16:04:02.520 memIdx: 0
4/8 16:04:02.555 ConsoleDeviceInitialize(): hwDetect = 0, hwChanged = 0
4/8 16:04:02.555 CGxDeviceD3d11:eviceSetFormat():
4/8 16:04:02.555 Format: 1920 x 1080 Window, Ds24X, multisample 1
4/8 16:04:02.584 Shader Model: 5_0
4/8 16:04:02.584 Vertex: vs_5_0
4/8 16:04:02.584 Hull: hs_5_0
4/8 16:04:02.584 Domain: ds_5_0
4/8 16:04:02.584 Geometry: gs_5_0
4/8 16:04:02.584 Pixel: ps_5_0
4/8 16:04:02.584 Compute: cs_5_0

[Tim]

Hey Xartin,

I actually modified PB to allow flags but never released that version since I didn't think anybody would want to use it. Let me see if I can dig that up or just re-add it (vs. waiting for PB 3.0 which is 75% done).

[xartin]

Originally Posted by Tim

Hey Xartin,

I actually modified PB to allow flags but never released that version since I didn't think anybody would want to use it. Let me see if I can dig that up or just re-add it (vs. waiting for PB 3.0 which is 75% done).

Sweetness thanks!

If you need a beta tester for PB3 you know you can count on me

[Tim]

Okay I'm going to take a stab here, but if anybody is reading this and tested an early PB2 build I did about 9 months ago w/flags and better support for EQ, please speak up. I've just gone through about 20 versions of unreleased PB and can't seem to find it. I'm a bit lazy atm to re-create and might just wait on the 3.0 final build.

[xartin]

The new 4.1 patch is out and blizzard did us a huge solid

you can now access the DX11 api configuration setting from within game via the advanced options menu!

stand down red alert Mr. Tim

[Tim]

Haha aight aight.

So does the new DX11 stuff make a difference, does it look better, or use more resources?