Nvidia Beta Driver VS Acer Vendor Driver

Recently Acer released a new Nvidia Driver 179.52.

I took this opportunity to test this vendor released driver against the awesome Nvidia Beta Driver 185.20 I have been using until now.

The download size of the Acer Released Drivers is much smaller than the Nvidia Beta Driver.

First I used Windows Experience Index to gauge their performance as I am too lazy to run an actual benchmark =P

Performance
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It is a disappointing 3.7 Aero Performance for the Acer Release Driver.

The Nvidia Beta Driver scored a much better 4.0 Aero Performance

(I didn't know what happened to the 0.1 after the reformat)

Supported Features

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I tried running a Sample CUDA Program from Nvidia CUDA SDK using both drivers

The Acer Released Drivers failed to render anything at all

While the Nvidia Beta Drivers rendered it excellently

Note: The Acer Release Drivers have yet to support PhysX while the Nvidia Beta Driver supported it

Additionally the Nvidia Beta Driver support new features yet to be seen in the Acer Released ones

For PowerMizer both Drivers supported it except you have to manually enable it in Nvidia Released Drivers sometimes but Vendor released Drivers always come with PowerMizer autoenabled.

Conclusion
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Well it is obvious that those Acer Release Drivers have a long way to go before being able to catch up to Nvidia Beta Releases. (I am not sure about other Vendors but Acer Released Drivers simply cannot make the mark)

Nvidia is right about providing OEM Driver support because Vendors cannot be trusted to release decent drivers.

We can see the same situation happening in ATi except ATi do not bother to release OEM drivers as such ATi drivers suffer from bad reputation in Windows Operating System compared to Nvidia generally.

For those people who own an Nvidia Card in their Laptop please get Nvidia Released Drivers
Continuing to run Vendors Release Driver is almost like crippling yourself on purpose, even though you have spent good money on it in the case of Acer.

So please do yourself a favour and use Nvidia Release Driver instead
(Check if your Hardware is supported by the newer drivers before installing them & try to update all drivers to the latest version to make sure intercompatibility exist)

Edit:

182.20 is no longer the latest Nvidia Released Driver

For the latest Nvidia Released Driver click here