TNT2 Drivers Guide (1/7)
Let’s face it. Not everyone is lucky enough to be able to afford the newest video cards, like the GeForce2 GTS, the Voodoo5 5500 or the ATi RADEON. On top of that, there are those hot-rod, speed demon cards, the ones that cost as much as a complete bargain computer does nowadays. Only a few privileged and wealthy – or obsessed – people are able to pay the enormous prices without flinching. Be it the GeForce2 Ultra or the Voodoo5 6000, no one will argue that these cards are the cream of the crop, the Lamborghinis or Porsches of the gaming world, so to speak. Meanwhile, most of us are riding around in our Hondas or Fords, or maybe the sporty Mazda MX-5 Miata. That, in our metaphor, would be the good old NVIDIA Riva TNT2. One of the most popular cards of its time (and still today), it can be found in an incredible number of systems. Many users see no reason to trade in their reliable and sufficiently fast card for something much more expensive. Most of the current games still run just fine with the TNT2, and besides, not everyone really needs 100 FPS in Quake 3 – 60 FPS should be enough for everyone but the most hardcore gamer. That’s why the majority of people probably still “drive” last year’s favorite model. So is the TNT2 really past its prime? Has it become obsolete? Seen from a technical perspective, te answer is a definite "yes". Simply too much has happened in the graphics market since the TNT2’s introduction back in May 1999 to still consider it a modern card by today’s standards. So what’s new? Well, some nifty little features like on-chip transformation and lighting (T&L), texture compression, and pixel shaders, to name a few, none of which the TNT2 supports. True, the only proof we have that some of these features truly exist are the tech demos accompanying the cards they are written for, since very few games support them. Nonetheless, T&L is starting to make some headway though, and hopefully so will the others with time. As far as age goes, the chip is a veritable Methuselah: It has seen four generations of reference driver releases, each prompted by the introduction of a new line of cards. The first of these was the original Detonator release (v1.71 to v2.25), which accompanied the TNT2’s introduction. Next came the Detonator 2 release 1 (v3.62 to 3.77) which coincided with the GeForce256’s first appearance, followed by Detonator 2 release 2 for the GeForce2 GTS (v5.06 to 5.33). The latest generation of reference drivers, logically named Detonator 3 (v.6.08 to 6.31 and later), was introduced for the GeForce2 MX line to enable additional features like TwinView.
As you can see, owners of the TNT2 can take their pick as far as drivers are concerned. Although the newest release offers the greatest compatibility with games, that doesn’t automatically make it the fastest driver for your card. NVIDIA tends to optimize its drivers for their latest generation of cards, so an older driver may yield better results. To find out which drivers offer the best performance in a given environment, we compared the following releases using an ASUS V3800 with a sideband-enabled bios:
To get an impression of how strongly the drivers are optimised for a certain line of processors (i.e. ISSE vs. 3Dnow!), I ran the same tests on two different platforms. The first is my reference testing rig, the i815 based PIII 866, the second is a KT133 based Duron 800MHz (600 overclocked). Aside from processors and mainboards, the systems used identical components (powersupply, RAM, etc.)
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Copyright: 10.10.2000 -
RIVA
Station 2000 - Lars Weinand URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/tnt2treiber_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
