Drivers

[Guest RET.CW4.ThievingSix=US=]

Ok so i have an Nvidia EVGA GT 240, and i have been using it to play bad company 2 for a while now, i know its not the best card and everything and when i got it it had old drivers that couldn't update. I was running BC2 on the lowest settings and i was still struggling to play the game in the height of action. So anyway recently i decided to retry updating to the latest drivers, and it worked, so i got in game and decided to see if the drivers made any difference(they used to be something like 168.80 or something) and there was a massive performance improvement, so i thought what the heck ill try this on medium, and i dident take any real performance hit, so i tried it on high, and still no major performance hit. Now i tried it on advance with all settings high with Filtering at x8 and AA at x1(theres no other options) with Vsync off, and i can run the game perfectly. WTF??? do drivers really make that much of difference, i no longer have that weird graphics lag that i used to get(havent tested FPS) and i can play much better? How is this possible? It almost feels like i have a new video card, is updating your drivers really this important?

[Guest Ret.Maj.Xander=US=]

A bad driver can make or break a card. All the hardware can be there, but if the software isn't telling it what to do in an efficient manner its just pretty plastic lol.

[Guest CC.Decayed=US=]

Yeah, what Xander said. Also, as new games are released, drivers can be tweaked to help out performance in those games, especially the popular games. But, if you have fraps, you should see if there is any fps hit. You can download a free trial at fraps.com You may not notice any type of performance hit, but there still may be a frame rate hit. The general consensus is that there is not a lot of difference between high and medium, and the graphic gain is not worth the performance hit. Also, since you mentioned you only have AA at 1x, you might want to try checking your settings.ini and see if you have dx set to 9. If you are noticing better performance, try going to Auto (which will go to dx10) and see if that makes it look better as well. DX9 is not bad, but dx10 is a bit better, and of course dx11 is awesome.

[Guest Ret.Maj.Xander=US=]

Also xfire has ingame FPS that I use. Set it up with Scroll lock + X then u can modify stuff if u hit the edit button which looks like a pencil.