Nvidia is claiming a nice 25% performance boost with the new GeForce 257.15 beta drivers, so we were expecting good things. Instead we saw the GeForce GTX 480 lagging behind the Radeon HD 5870 with a 14% average frame rate advantage. The minimum frame result was almost a match however. The GeForce GTX 480 was ~7% faster than the Radeon HD 5850, while again the GeForce GTX 470 performance was disappointing with an average of just 33fps. Update (6/5): In our first run of this benchmark we unintentionally overlooked two Nvidia-specific settings that are available in Just Cause 2 (Bokeh Filters and GPU Water Simulation). These CUDA features are enabled by default when selecting the ‘High’ preset and thus impacted performance making for an unfair comparison against the ATI Radeon boards. The graphs above have been updated to show apples vs. apples comparison, and the difference is very obvious. The GeForce GTX 480 now dominates this game by a convincing margin, while the GTX 470 fares much better against the Radeon HD 5850, albeit still losing by a couple frames per second. Our original graphs with CUDA featured turned on (Nvidia boards only) can be found here and here. If you are wondering what these effects look like when turned on, check out this video on Youtube.
