One of the first topics to show up on the Steam forums, following the launch of BioShock Infinite this morning, related to issues Nvidia players were having with performance in the game. This is in spite of new drivers the company has just released for its 400, 500, and 600 series of GeForce cards.
Nvidia’s 314.22 drivers, run on a GTX 680, provide a boost in performance of up to 41% in BioShock Infinite. They also improve performance in Tomb Raider by up to 60%, Sniper Elite V2 by up to 23%, and Sleeping Dogs by up to 13%. If you have two GTX 680s in SLI, performance gains in Sniper Elite V2 and Sleeping Dogs are similar, but StarCraft II should also improve by up to 10% and Civilization V by up to 15%.
There are some other changes, such as additional or updated SLI profiles for new or upcoming games, 3D Vision profiles that are either entirely new or improved, and support for applications built using CUDA 5 and earlier. Despite this all, and an apparent high framerate in BioShock Infinite, some Nvidia gamers are still complaining of stuttering. Another thread indicates that this may be tied to Ambient Occlusion, BioShock Infinite using HDAO, which is AMD optimized, while Nvidia cards perform better with HBAO. One can make the switch by disabling Ambient Occlusion in game and enabling it in the Nvidia control panel.
Sources: Gameranx / Steam Forums