We already told you that the new 158.16 driver is more or less two per cent faster or slower in games and benchmarks, but we figured out that it is also 30 per cent faster in synthetic benchmarks.
We had a chance to test a Geforce 8800 GTX at its default 575 MHz with the old 97.92 drivers. We used Nvidia's beloved GPU DIP test.
In Cell shading the 97.92 does the job in 682,3311 msec and scores 403,3983 GFlop/sec. The same card, still clocked at 575 MHz for the core, but with the 158.16 drives now performs the same task in 584,9589 msec and scores 470,5480 GFlop/sec.
The third scenario included an overclocked G80 card clocked at 700 MHz, what can easily be the clock speed of G80 Ultra and the job was finished in 496,1952 msec and the card scored 554,7236 GFlop/sec.
So there is a hope for Geforce 8800 Ultra and GTX after all.