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NVIDIA driverscomparsion v3.77/5.08/5.13
From time to time, inofficial NVIDIA driver releases find their way into the Internet. The newest drivers you can get today are the 5.xx series drivers. In the past NVIDIA often made huge driver release jumps. There were Release 1 drivers (up to 1.35), Release 2 (1.71 to 2.40). Currently official are Release 3 drivers (3.48 to 3.77). Now we have a new inofficial release: 5.08 and 5.13. Inofficial means that the driver was not made public by NVIDIA and found its way into the net on ways nobody knows of (somebody does, sure :-)). NVIDIA offers new driver releases on its developer pages (you need login etc) for game and hardware developers to check their projects with these drivers. You really canīt call them beta: Such a driver may be a realease candidate or a instable early alpha version. You should know this if you use such drivers!! They may be rockstable or terribly buggy. Donīt call NVIDIA if you shoot your system into Nirvana! In the past a new release came in the time where new chips were on the start. The same this time. The new 5.06 (w2k) and 5.13 drivers allready show the next generation (NV15 and NV11) in its inf-files: NVIDIA&DEV_0150.DeviceDesc="NVIDIA
GeForce2 GTS" Performance Comparsion The new drivers 5.xx offer a much better OpenGL performance than the "old" v3.77 drivers. But thereīs also an increase in D3D performance. To find out the differences Iīve tested all 3 drivers on a ASUS V6800 Deluxe with 32MB DDR RAM. The CPU was a Intel Pentium III 700E (100MHz FSB) on a Tekram P6BX-A Mainboard with 196MB RAM. All numbers in FPS (Frames per second). The benches were made in W98 SE. Quake3: I ran Quake3 in its default settings (ohne r_ext_compress_textures 1):
You can see big performance improvements in Quake3. v5.13 seem to be the fastest at all but the difference to v5.08 is pretty small. The cons of the v5.xx drivers is the worse image quality compared to v3.77. Other features of the new v5.xx drivers is the support for S3 Texture Compression in OpenGL and Full-Screen-Anti-Aliasing (FSAA). More about Anti-Aliasing later. Incoming:This DirectX5 game run damn fast on todayīs GFX cards. You can notice slight performance differences very good. The bad thing with Incoming is that the engine is too old because of the use of Direct X5.
Normaly the CPU is the limiting factor at low resolutions because the fillrate of the graphics cards is high enough and the CPU canīt deliver enough data to the card. This changes when you use higher resolutions and color depths where the fillrate is limiting. This could also explain these results - the new driver seems to be a bit more CPU loaded at low resolutions. But this is only speculation. You also canīt compare D3D results with OpenGL results because this are two absolutely independent drivers - developed by two different teams. I took 3DMark 2000 from Madonion.com to check the performance of the new drivers in an actual Direct X7 environment:
v5.13 is the fastest drivers at all!! To see where they can score you may take a look on the result table below:
The largest difference between v3.77 and v5.08 can be found in the CPU Rendering Speed and in a better fillrate. The Game Benchmarks are not much faster with v5.08 compared to v3.77. v5.08 lost performance in the AGP rendering tests. The newest v5.13 can also score in the CPU speed bench and they are a lot faster in the Game tests. The AGP performance is better than with the v5.08 drivers but the results are still lower than the v3.77 performance here. Also improved in v5.13: The Polygon rendering Speed. It seems NVIDIA found something here to get better T&L D3D Performance - or do they use more CPU power? Letīs take a look on the 32Bit results:
You can see the same behaviors here as in 16 Bit. The AGP Performance is the only different thing here. The v5.13 drivers are suddenly much faster in the AGP test than v3.77. The v5.08 drivers had problems in the 64MB rendering test. It seems NVIDIA fixed this in v5.13. Now letīs go to other new features in the drivers: Antialiasing! |
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| Copyright: RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/detonators_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
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