Introduction

While not as common as Catalyst releases, major ForceWare releases are probably more important for the simple fact that they don't come as often. The fact that they don't come as often also means that people expect more out of them, since AMD make the effort to release drivers monthly.

The launch of the GTS 450 has brought with it the new ForceWare 260 package, and while it's had a bit of a cosmetic upgrade when it comes to installing the drivers, we ask if NVIDIA have just slapped some makeup on the latest set and sent them on their way.

We'll be taking the normal approach to the ForceWare 260.52s as we would a Catalyst set; test a couple of cards, in this case the GTX 480 and GTX 460, across a good bunch of synthetic and real world games to see if the latest driver package does anything for overall performance.

In our Galaxy GTS 450 review you saw that originally we had a 259 driver with the card. Just after I finished testing, this driver arrived and it showed some good gains for the new mid range NVIDIA model. We've been told that these gains should translate into other 400 series cards, but there's only one way to find out. Let's quickly check out the test system before we get stuck into the performance of the new drivers compared to the old ones.