Nvidia has answered AMD's 'Never Settle' challenge with a new driver release of its own, coincidentally offering up to 15 per cent performance increases in popular games.

Announced shortly after AMD's Catalyst 12.11 'Never Settle' driver, Nvidia's latest beta driver - 310.33 - match the red camp's performance boosts, offering up to 15.7 per cent greater framerates on the GeForce GTX 680 and 7.5 per cent on the GTX 660. Other GeForce products are promised to get a small boost, too, with official figures not yet forthcoming.

During testing on a Rampage IV Extreme motherboard with Intel Core i7-3960X running at 3.3GHz and 8GB of RAM, Nvidia claims not-insignificant boosts to popular games running on a GeForce GTX 680 with the beta drivers. By far the biggest gain is in The Chronicles of Riddick, which achieved the AMD-matching 15.7 per cent boost, while Skyrim follows with a 10.9 per cent boost, while Starcraft II also sees a 5.6 per cent performance boost. Other highlights include F1 2011 with 4.4 per cent higher framerates, Batman: Arkham City with a 5.3 per cent gain, Civilization V with 2.8 per cent and Deus Ex: Human Revolution with 3.2 per cent.

While the average of those figures fall short of AMD's near-10 per cent performance increase across the board with its Catalyst 12.11 driver package, it's still free frames for those who have already invested in an Nvidia board.

Additional features in the new driver include ambient occlusion support in Cross Fire, Dragon Nest and Meng San Guo, while updated support for the feature in Counter-strike: Global Offensive, Darksiders 2 and MechWarrior Online is added. New SLI profiles for Dirt: Showdown, Dota 2, Dou Zhan Shen, F1 2012, FIFA 13 and Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad help boost performance on multi-card systems, while 3D Vision profiles are added or updated for a selection of games including XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

The beta driver package is available to download now from Nvidia's official site

Source