Drivers

The new NVIDIA based graphics cards appeared in our test laboratory almost simultaneously with the new 43.45 driver. The new driver version differs a little bit from 42.68 driver version, which we used to test NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (see our NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra Review).

First of all, there appeared new full-screen anti-aliasing modes for NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra: 8x and 16x. These modes using supersampling are also available for NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra:

The second interesting innovation in the new 43.45 driver, which you can see on the screenshot above is the “new” Quality mode, which used to be called Balanced. Not bad, don’t you think so?

You know that the best image quality can be obtained on NVIDIA GeForce FX chips family in Application mode, where all the optimizations are disabled completely. Then comes a faster Balanced mode with slightly worse image quality (now it is called Quality). The last mode, which is the fastest, but provides the lowest quality of all three is Aggressive mode (now it is called Performance).

In other words, if we call these modes according to the speed and image quality provided, it would be more logical to call them Quality, Balanced and Performance, accordingly.

This is no secret to us why NVIDIA had to rename these work modes, giving up the common sense and logic. When you see the Quality mode in the control panel (which is used by default, by the way), the users and reviewers will be sure that this mode provides the best quality. In reality the cards will provide not the best image quality, but will get a performance boost compared with the performance in Application mode instead. As a result, they will look better when compared to competing solutions.

Well, I don’t like to be cheated on, do you?

But these are not all the surprises prepared by the “new” Quality mode. We will continue our investigation a bit later, when we will dwell on full-screen anti-aliasing quality provided by the new graphics solutions.

Testbed and Methods

We used the following testbed for our test session:

• Intel Pentium 4 2800MHz CPU;
• ASUS P4S8X (SiS648) mainboard;
• 512MB DDR400 SDRAM;
• IBM DTLA 305030 30GB HDD.

The software set included:

• Microsoft Windows XP Professional;
• Microsoft DirectX 9.0;
• SiS AGP v. 114 driver;
• Detonator 43.45 for NVIDIA based graphics cards;
• Catalyst 3.1 for ATI based graphics cards.

Our today’s heroes will be tested against the following rivals:

• NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200-8x 128MB, 250MHz chip / 512MHz (256MHz DDR) memory;
• NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8x 128MB, 275Mhz chip / 512MHz (256MHz DDR) memory;
• ATI RADEON 9500 Pro 128MB, 275MHz chip / 540MHz (270MHz DDR) memory;
• ATI RADEON 9000 Pro 128MB, 275MHz chip/ 500MHz (250MHz DDR) memory.