Heads Up.. Detonator 40 Drivers Out

[DennyA]

Grab 'em before the whole world discovers them and downloads slow to a crawl... http://www.nvidia.com/drivers

Nvidia claims up to a 25% performance increase, in addition to a ton of new features for LCD and multi-monitor setups.

So they've had HOW many 25% performance increases now? Does this mean their driver team is amazingly talented, or that the guys who wrote the first drivers really, really sucked? :-)

[DennyA]

You know, it's interesting... Every time ATI threatens to jump far ahead in performance, Nvidia miraculously comes up with new drivers that tighten the gap.

Are they just working hard to remain competitive, or could they actually be purposefully throttling performance in early drivers so they can instantly play catch up with competitors? If it's the latter, aren't they doing a disservice to their paying customers?

Discuss.

[Tyjenks]

If it's the latter, aren't they doing a disservice to their paying customers?

Discuss.

yes

[Ben Sones]

Wow, they made some major changes to the (and additions) to the Display Properties controls. Play around with that Digital Vibrance slider, for instance. Neat.

[Met_K]

You all do realize that there's a very good reason why you can overclock the fuck out of nvidia cards, don't you?

[Jason Becker]

"So they've had HOW many 25% performance increases now?"


They seem to do this whenever a competitior comes out with a new card(ATI 9700). Have to see if the 25% is a more general claim or only for the 2% of users that run at 1980x1720 or something on their 22' monitors. Still a smart release by them to sooth the urges of Nvidia users that might be eying the Radeon 9700.

[DennyA]

Lots better support for dual monitors now, too. I haven't found much gaming use for dual displays (although CFS3 should change that), but it's fantastic when I'm working.

Hey, any of you guys with Ti4600s... Are you overclocking them? What speeds? Is it really worth doing? I mean, I run most games at 1280x960x32 with full detail and get a smooth frame rate. The only ones I get any stutters at all on are CPU limited.

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

Hey, any of you guys with Ti4600s... Are you overclocking them? What speeds? Is it really worth doing? I mean, I run most games at 1280x960x32 with full detail and get a smooth frame rate. The only ones I get any stutters at all on are CPU limited.

I have a Ti4600 and never once thought of overclocking it.

Don't bother unless the game is fillrate impaired

As for 25% increase, which they claim each time, I'll believe it when I see smoke coming out of my Ti4600.

[Jason Cross]

Are they just working hard to remain competitive, or could they actually be purposefully throttling performance in early drivers so they can instantly play catch up with competitors? If it's the latter, aren't they doing a disservice to their paying customers?


The truth is somewhere in the middle. I think NVIDIA honestly gets as much performance as they can out of their drivers when a new product is released, and then they keep working on drivers. But they don't release a new revision every month that nets only a couple percent performance advantage, instead waiting until they can ball up a whole set of improvements (not just performance) and also strategically time the release for marketing purposes.

For what it's worth, ATI made bigger performance strides with the Radeon 8500 over the last year's worth of driver updates than NVIDIA has with their products/drivers.

The new Detonators are good stuff, by the way. Anti-aliasing is a little faster, but anisotropic filtering (my FAVORITE THING IN THE WORLD) is a good deal faster. And there's finally an aniso. slider in the Direct3D panel.

They also replaced all those seperate tabs with a little side-menu thing, which is a step in the right direction.

The LCD projector correction features and stuff in this release are pretty slick, too. Not relevant for most of us, but good to see someone's doing it.

Question: does anyone know what the "Texture Sharpening" checkbox at the bottom of the anti-aliasing menu does, specifically? I've asked NVIDIA but don't have an answer yet (I'll post here when I get one). My guess, and it's just that, is that it either uses a different multisampling sample pattern or, more likely, it adjusts the LOD bias.

[Jason McCullough]

Totally fucked my system; I had to go back to the old drivers.

[Brad Grenz]

You realize, of course, these are only for nvidia hardware.

[Jason McCullough]

Yes, and I have a Geforce 4. If I installed with setup.exe, my machine would alternate between resetting and 30 seconds of displaying just the background at startup. If I installed by picking the inf for a driver update, the screen would reset every time I clicked on something.

Clearing my system of all nvidia drivers before upgrading didn't help, and someone on gaming age is having the exact same problems. I'll wait for a fix.

[Brad Grenz]

Well, you start with the obvious...

What mobo/chipset?

[Murph]

Is there a range on this?

What I mean is, I'm (still) running a GF2Ti on a 450 processor, with Win98SE. Should I even bother?

[Mark Bussman]

Xaroc did some benchmarks on a GF2 of some kind yesterday while we were on the IRC channel. I think he said he gained a whopping 24 3DMarks and there was no change in Quake3. I dont recall his system specs, so I'll let him fill in the details, but they're probably not worth the effort.

[Dave Perkins]

As far as I can tell, the new Detonator drivers are only for Windows XP and 2000. Is that correct? I have Windows ME.

- Dave

[Jason Cross]

The current release is only for Windows 2000 and XP. Windows 98/ME drivers should follow.

If you've got an older card (GF2 or even GF3) you probably won't see much change in performance, but it's generally a good idea to get new drivers just for the sake of compatibility with upcoming games. And often, the performance improvement is most noticeable in games that aren't even out yet - it's just the dev. relations team at work.

Thus far I've seen two other people with serious problems installing the drivers, both of which was fixed by using Detonator Destroyer to completely and totally nuke the old drivers, rebooting (which kicks in VESA SVGA drivers and re-detects your card), hitting "cancel" on card redetect, and installing the drivers from the executable. I think you can get Det. Destroyer at www.guru3d.com.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: If you've got the new drivers, make sure you set the "Texture Anisotropic Setting" slider in the Direct3D panel to at least 1X. The 0X it defaults to actually point-samples some textures, hosing up quality even worse than bilinear! 1X is the equivalent of having Aniso. "disabled". You don't have to worry about the OpenGL tab.

NVIDIA should really make 1X the default.

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

NVIDIA should really make 1X the default.

You have no idea just how many times I've told them that. :roll:

At least ATI, after much bitching, decided to adhere to suggestions I've made to them e.g. enabling table fog by default, removing one or two tabs from their display panel (and leaving them in the registry) etc

[Jason Cross]

]
You have no idea just how many times I've told them that.

Well at least this is their first public driver that even HAS Direct3D aniso filtering (without registry hacking or using a tweak program), and what is 1X on that slider is what it used to be permanently set at.

With any luck, there will be a hue and cry about that setting from "the community" now that the drivers are out.

And yeah, ATI has too many tabs in their driver. For that matter, so does NVIDIA, though they've hidden them all in that slide-out window.

Matrox's PowerDesk utility for the Parhelia just puts all the other control panels and such utilities to SHAME. It's the one thing they did with that card which totally smokes the competition.

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

Matrox's PowerDesk utility for the Parhelia just puts all the other control panels and such utilities to SHAME. It's the one thing they did with that card which totally smokes the competition.

I quite agree!

[Anonymous]

D. Smart one wrote:

"removing one or two tabs from their display panel (and leaving them in the registry) etc"

Could you clue me in on what features you convinced them to remove from the control panel are, so I know what these formerly conveniently placed features are, so I can hunt for them in the registry?

[Dave Perkins]

The current release is only for Windows 2000 and XP. Windows 98/ME drivers should follow.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: If you've got the new drivers, make sure you set the "Texture Anisotropic Setting" slider in the Direct3D panel to at least 1X. The 0X it defaults to actually point-samples some textures, hosing up quality even worse than bilinear! 1X is the equivalent of having Aniso. "disabled". You don't have to worry about the OpenGL tab.

Thanks for the tips, and if anyone spots the 98/ME drivers, let us backwoods computer users know! I especially appreciate the important note.

- Dave

[Xaroc]

Xaroc did some benchmarks on a GF2 of some kind yesterday while we were on the IRC channel. I think he said he gained a whopping 24 3DMarks and there was no change in Quake3. I dont recall his system specs, so I'll let him fill in the details, but they're probably not worth the effort.

If you have a GF2 don't bother. Q3 shows no difference at 1024x768x32 and there was a 24 point increase in 3DMark (within the margin of error). If you have a GF4 the results are postive, I gained around 1000 points in 3DMark putting me up to 13273. In Quake3 I gained only 5 fps up to 316 at 1024x768x32. Clearly at that res it is not really challenging the card, in the future I will have to turn up the resolution or use AA and anisotropic filtering to get a better idea of the change.

-- Xaroc

[Xaroc]

I ran 3dmark again with the 1x instead of 0x and it is 12929 rather than 13273. So not quite as much of an increase, still it is free performance I definitely won't complain.

-- Xaroc

[Jason Becker]

The few sites I've seen do tests with the new drivers only show 3Dmark2001 improvements. Everything else is mostly a wash. Just sounds like they are just in a pissing contest with ATI(who does the same thing with their drivers) as to who can get the higher 3Dmark2001 score.

[Xaroc]

The few sites I've seen do tests with the new drivers only show 3Dmark2001 improvements. Everything else is mostly a wash. Just sounds like they are just in a pissing contest with ATI(who does the same thing with their drivers) as to who can get the higher 3Dmark2001 score.

You may be right, I noticed some insane frame rates in the nature section which is probably the worst indicator of real game performance of all of the game tests. This would explain why there aren't significant increases in things other than 3Dmark.

-- Xaroc

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

D. Smart one wrote:

"removing one or two tabs from their display panel (and leaving them in the registry) etc"

Could you clue me in on what features you convinced them to remove from the control panel are, so I know what these formerly conveniently placed features are, so I can hunt for them in the registry?

There were quite a few of them actually, but I can't remember off the top of my head. I provided user settings in my game's FAQ (www.3000ad.com/downloads/bcm/bcmfaq.html). Scroll down to the ATI section in the Video Issues section and you'll see about three of them. One of them (W Buffer setting), they put back but moved into a different tab. The others no longer appear.

And if you go fiddling around in your registry and pissing around with settings you have NO business even LOOKING AT, you deserve what you get. :P There is a VERY GOOD reason such features are hidden in the registry. Don't fuck around with them UNLESS you know what you're doing!!! :shock:

And anyone who knows what they're doing, should know that you don't have to go screwing around in your registry - when all you have to do is download and install Rage3D Tweak and it will show all the ATI settings (visible, invisible, non-existent etc).

Sorry for being harsh, but being a game developer means that I have had to deal with this shit for God knows how long and gamers go around bitching about why one game doesn't work when another one does. The reason is usually obvious. What works for one game, doesn't for another.

And video card manufacturers have NO business exposing settings which are likely to cause trouble due to user tinkering.

[Anonymous]

Not intending to start a flame war, Derek, but you pushed one of my buttons there. I absolutely hate it when folks like Microsoft treat me like an idiot and make it hard for me to do what I need to do, in order to "protect me from myself."

Example: the recent versions of Windows products which hide the contents of the System folder, and make you confirm with a dialogue box that you REALLY want to see what's in there EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU OPEN THE SYSTEM FOLDER. Gimme a break!

I understand your perspective on this, but removing features from the convenient access of people who know what they're doing has its downsides as well.

[Matthew Gallant]

Example: the recent versions of Windows products which hide the contents of the System folder, and make you confirm with a dialogue box that you REALLY want to see what's in there EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU OPEN THE SYSTEM FOLDER. Gimme a break!

See, the thing is, you can permanently disable that. So really, Microsoft is protecting you from yourself: since you are unable to figure out the very simple way to disable the warning, you very much need that warning.

A tech's worst nightmare is fixing the computer of someone who almost knows what they're doing.

[Anonymous]

Oh, kindly fuck off, pompous smartass!

I've been using computers since TRS-80s. I *NEVER* call tech support. I fix all of my own computer problems, build my own computers. I've professionally researched and solved bugs full-time for a software company.

It's a matter of inconvenience, not a matter of inability to research what obscure setting turns off Windows annoyances.

[Xaroc]

Oh, kindly fuck off, pompous smartass!

I've been using computers since TRS-80s. I *NEVER* call tech support. I fix all of my own computer problems, build my own computers. I've professionally researched and solved bugs full-time for a software company.

It's a matter of inconvenience, not a matter of inability to research what obscure setting turns off Windows annoyances.

It is annoying for a power user to deal with but not everyone is a power user. You don't want granny deleting files in the system folder by accident. You can turn it off and as a power user you should know how.

-- Xaroc

[Derek Smart [3000AD]]

Oh, kindly fuck off, pompous smartass!

I've been using computers since TRS-80s. I *NEVER* call tech support. I fix all of my own computer problems, build my own computers. I've professionally researched and solved bugs full-time for a software company.

It's a matter of inconvenience, not a matter of inability to research what obscure setting turns off Windows annoyances.

It is annoying for a power user to deal with but not everyone is a power user. You don't want granny deleting files in the system folder by accident. You can turn it off and as a power user you should know how.

-- Xaroc

haha, I was going to post that, but you beat me to it :D

He's a power user (TRS-80 and all), but he can't (a) figure out how to disable it permanently (the first thing most power users did, upon discovering it (b) doesn't get it that MS didn't develop their OS for power users.

Santa, put that power saw down and go mow the lawn, mate. I think you're getting your wires crossed. :lol:

...and you might want to try Linux, while you're at it. :D

[Ben Sones]

I had a TRS-80, too, but I don't know that it made me a power user. In fact, the only thing it really taught me (other than Basic) is that a tape recorder makes a really crappy storage device.

[Bub, Andrew]

I have a comic book where a couple clean cut kids help Superman defeat the bad guys using a TRS-80. Ah Radio Shack....

[deanco]

I'm gonna have to weigh in on the side of Santa here. For me, the question is not whether those 'features' protect me from myself. I just feel I have a right to know exactly what files are on my computer. I remember when I found out that some files were hidden, I was really taken aback. How dare they hide files from me! I'm a grown man! Same with hiding extentions. I just want to know what my files are really named, if the computer thinks of it as autoexec.bat, that's what I want to know, and I'm trusting Microsoft to tell me this with their nifty operating system. But they're not, they hide it. And this is what I don't dig, at all.

DeanCo--

[Jason Cross]

The few sites I've seen do tests with the new drivers only show 3Dmark2001 improvements. Everything else is mostly a wash. Just sounds like they are just in a pissing contest with ATI(who does the same thing with their drivers) as to who can get the higher 3Dmark2001 score.

Actually, most of the driver improvements in the 40.41 drivers are in three areas:

Vertex and Pixel Shader speed - hence the 3DMark improvement. Not a lot of the current "bechmark" games make use of vertex or pixel shaders. There's not a lot of Aquanox benchmarking going on, but if you did benchmark that, you'd notice a performance boost there as well (since Aquanox makes good use of vertex and pixel shaders to do things more quickly, if you've got the hardware). Similarly, UT2003 will likely see a nice performance boost.

Anti-aliasing speed - it's not a huge boost, but anti-aliasing speed has seen a small increase across the board. Again, the sites that whipped up a one-hour driver comparison article didn't bother to try different AA and anisotropic settings.

Anisotropic filtering speed - besides actually exposing aniso. in Direct3D, which used to require a tweak program or registry hack, the speed of aniso is a good 10-15% better in most cases. This is not something that the diligant and thorough websites making driver comparison articles bothered to check.

It's also worth noting that the new drivers probably fix compatibility problems with some up and coming games, as that's the job of the developer relations team at NVIDIA (who do a pretty good job). At the same time, if you don't have those games yet, you dont' need these drivers yet. There have been a couple other bugs discovered (see my other topic), so it might be worth waiting for one more revision. Still, even if you've got a GeForce2 and won't see any performance boost, it's a good idea to have the most up-to-date drivers possible.

[Jason Becker]

Well some of the things may have been improved like you said, but I don't totally buy it yet. When I see multiple sites/mags etc that can show some sort of measurable increase in the areas I'll believe it. I frankly could care less if they got 5000 points better in 3Dmark2001 myself. If you can list becnhmarks that show this I would welcome to see them, but for now all I see is Nvidia 3Dmark2001 tweaking, much like ATI has done in the past.

[Xaroc]

Well some of the things may have been improved like you said, but I don't totally buy it yet. When I see multiple sites/mags etc that can show some sort of measurable increase in the areas I'll believe it. I frankly could care less if they got 5000 points better in 3Dmark2001 myself. If you can list becnhmarks that show this I would welcome to see them, but for now all I see is Nvidia 3Dmark2001 tweaking, much like ATI has done in the past.

Personally if Jason C. says they are good I would be inclined to believe him. In my limited testing nothing went down so that in and of itself is probably worth upgrading them for.

-- Xaroc

[Anonymous]

Nvidia has posted new Beta Detonator drivers, these are 40.71. Previous beta drivers were 40.41. These aren't leaked, 'cause you get them straight from Nvidia's site. They're not advertising the beta drivers on the front page (and if you dig, their official drivers are still the 30.82's). But here's the link:

2K/XP drivers:
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=winxp-2k_40.71

9x drivers:
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=win9x_40.71

[Lunch of Kong]

These beta drivers gave me a 7% improvement in 3dmark 2001 scores.

6.13.10.2750: 9500
6.13.10.4071: 10200 (anis set to 1)

Hey, I set aniso to 0, and got 10300. So I get an 8% improvement.

[voltaic]

Is there a range on this?

What I mean is, I'm (still) running a GF2Ti on a 450 processor, with Win98SE. Should I even bother?

Hey man, I play modern games like SOF2 and Jedi Knight 2 just fine with most settings turned up on my 1GHz Athlon (old style) with a Radeon 32meg and Windows 98 SE. I'll upgrade when I have to, not when a shiny magazine tells me I have to. And certainly not when patches are still coming out for new operating systems which mostly run most games most of the time. I like fully running all my games all the time. </windowsxp angst>

[voltaic]

]...and you might want to try Linux, while you're at it. :D

Not a bad idea. Too bad there aren't any* games for it.

*NOTE: Yes, I know that there have been a whopping dozen or perhaps even two dozen retail, professional titles released for Linux.

[MrAngryFace]

My card's performance went poop with these drivers. I was getting like 90+ on the first car demo but now I get nothing but 60 fps. Whats the deal?

[Paxton]

these drivers, like the 40.41's, don't seem to work well with Freedom Force or Age of Wonders 2. has anyone else encountered problems?

[MarchHare]

How well do they work in BF1942?

[MrAngryFace]

I lost 2000 3d marks with them. WTF Nvidia.

[Anonymous]

Limited to 60fps? Make sure D3D vsync is off.

[Jason Cross]

I lost 2000 3d marks with them. WTF Nvidia.

Just double-check a couple things first, like did you have vsync disbled before and now it's re-enabled? Did you have Aniso. filtering off and now it's on, or set to a different value? Is AA enabled now and maybe it wasn't before?

And how big a drop is 2000 3D marks? Did you drop from 7000 to 5000? Or from 13000 to 11000? There's a big difference.

Judging by your post stating that you get "nothing but 60fps," it sounds like your refresh rate at that resolution is set to 60Hz and that you've got vsync enabled. Look at the "refresh rate override" option as a sub-category of the Direct3D settins in the new drivers, and disable vsync as well.

[MrAngryFace]

It dropped from 7200 to 5000. I turned off v-sync, and refresh is at 85. I have no clue whats wrong. AA isn't on either.

[Anonymous]

I haven't used any programs to measure performance. All I know is, these new drivers messed up Mafia good and proper. I went back to 30.82. (Just starrting the Free Ride Extreme missions. :) )

Peter

[DennyA]

And today we have the 40.72 drivers on the site.

Anyone tried them? Supposedly they fix some game compatibility problems.

[MrAngryFace]

Im giving it a shot. BF1942 ran better with the drivers even tho it murdered my 3DMarks score so I dunno.

The new release did the trick, now 3D Marks actually benchmarks. Got a 200 point increase.

[Jason Cross]

posted on another topic, but I figured I'd add it to the discussion here as well...

For those that might be having driver prolems with the latest GF4 fare (40.72 or whatever):

I found this software fix the other day, which supposedly removes the parts of the 30.xx series drivers that are conflicting with the 40.xx for some people.

I don't know if it actually makes any difference, because the 40.72s work just peachy for me. I know they're beta and all, but I've had no issues whatsoever.

http://www.jester2k.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/jester2kdetfix.htm

[DennyA]

The Detonator FX 44.something drivers are out. Everyone must be at E3 -- I got the fastest download ever off my cable modem, a full 500K/sec.

[westyx2]

talk about a thread that's been revived once too often. woah

.. anyways, they any good? what card you running them on?

[wumpus]

I think they're only "improved", performance-wise, if you have a GeforceFX card (any model).

[westyx2]

*nod*.

well that rules me out for the next 3 years, then :)