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Investigating NVIDIA’s BatteryBoost with MSI GT72

BatteryBoost initially launched with the GTX 800M series earlier this year, and our first look at the technology came with the MSI GT70 with GTX 880M. That may not have been the best starting point, and unfortunately most of the gaming notebooks we’ve looked at since then haven’t been much better. Armed with the latest MSI GT72 sporting a Maxwell 2.0 GTX 980M, NVIDIA claims that BatteryBoost is finally going to hit the 2+ hours mark for gaming. Read on for our in-depth testing of BatteryBoost.

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Benchmarked – Civilization: Beyond Earth

One of the longest running gaming franchises around, the Civilization series goes all the way back to my high school years. There have been many changes along the way, but the core turn-based strategy gameplay remains. With this latest release, Civilization once again heads beyond the confines of our planet. What sort of hardware does it require to run the game, and does this fifth Mantle enabled title add anything new to the mix? That’s what we’re here to find out.

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Benchmarked – Civilization: Beyond Earth

One of the longest running gaming franchises around, the Civilization series goes all the way back to my high school years. There have been many changes along the way, but the core turn-based strategy gameplay remains. With this latest release, Civilization once again heads beyond the confines of our planet. What sort of hardware does it require to run the game, and does this fifth Mantle enabled title add anything new to the mix? That’s what we’re here to find out.

NVIDIA 344.48 WHQL Drivers Available; DSR Added To Fermi & Kepler
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NVIDIA 344.48 WHQL Drivers Available; DSR Added To Fermi & Kepler

NVIDIA just released their latest driver updates today, bringing us up to version 344.48. These are WHQL certified drivers, and they’re also Game Ready for several upcoming titles. NVIDIA specifically calls out Civilization: Beyond Earth (launching tomorrow), Lords of the Fallen (coming October 28), and Elite: Dangerous (a Kickstarter game currently available in Beta form). You can snag the drivers at the usual place, or if you’re like most people and are running a desktop GPU on Windows 7/8.1 64-bit, here’s the direct link; the drivers are also available for most NVIDIA laptops.

Looking over the complete release notes, the 344.48 drivers also bring DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution) support to Kepler and Fermi GPUs, there are a few tweaks to upcoming games (e.g. Assassin’s Creed Unity notes that control panel FXAA is disabled), and SLI profiles have been added for ten new games. There are no specific details on performance improvements with the new drivers, which is insteresting as usually about a month or two after a major GPU launch (i.e. GM204), NVIDIA will further refine their drivers to extract more performance; perhaps we’ll see some performance enhancements in the near future for GM204 owners.

NVIDIA 344.48 WHQL Drivers Available; DSR Added To Fermi & Kepler
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NVIDIA 344.48 WHQL Drivers Available; DSR Added To Fermi & Kepler

NVIDIA just released their latest driver updates today, bringing us up to version 344.48. These are WHQL certified drivers, and they’re also Game Ready for several upcoming titles. NVIDIA specifically calls out Civilization: Beyond Earth (launching tomorrow), Lords of the Fallen (coming October 28), and Elite: Dangerous (a Kickstarter game currently available in Beta form). You can snag the drivers at the usual place, or if you’re like most people and are running a desktop GPU on Windows 7/8.1 64-bit, here’s the direct link; the drivers are also available for most NVIDIA laptops.

Looking over the complete release notes, the 344.48 drivers also bring DSR (Dynamic Super Resolution) support to Kepler and Fermi GPUs, there are a few tweaks to upcoming games (e.g. Assassin’s Creed Unity notes that control panel FXAA is disabled), and SLI profiles have been added for ten new games. There are no specific details on performance improvements with the new drivers, which is insteresting as usually about a month or two after a major GPU launch (i.e. GM204), NVIDIA will further refine their drivers to extract more performance; perhaps we’ll see some performance enhancements in the near future for GM204 owners.