X-bit labs

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

NVIDIA Preps Performance Push with New ForceWare. NVIDIA’s ForceWare 81.26 Sets Performance Records

HardwareOC has posted a comparison of NVIDIA ForceWare graphics card drivers. This investigation contains thirteen versions of the latest drivers for NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, including beta versions of ForceWare 80.40 and 81.26.

The investigation was carried out on XFX GeForce 7800 GTX graphics card running on an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ based system in such popular benchmarking applications as 3DMark03 and 3DMark05, as well as FarCry and Doom III games. Each driver version was tested two times – first with default settings and then with high quality settings with enabled FSAA and Anisotropic filtration. The author compared different versions in terms of performance and quality levels.

“The ForceWare 81.26 driver is very fast, optimal for new benchmark records. There were some noticeable errors with benchmark, but only with the CPU test. When the 3D measurements so far no errors could be found. We will let you know, if something changes,” writes HardwareOC.

What is interesting about gaming performance of the ForceWare 81.26 is that it left behind every other version of NVIDIA’s drivers in modes with no antialiasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, but did not perform that well with the eye-candy enabled. Such behavior may indicate that NVIDIA is working on a way to tangibly improve performance in situations when the speed is bound to a certain level. It is unclear whether the company plans to incorporate any optimizations, or use resources of a computer that were not used before, for instance, utilize processor’s second core or dynamically overclock certain system components.

“As everyone can recognize by the measurements today, the drivers still are in the development phase. With the today’s date we can recommend meanwhile only the first officially driver 77,72. We tested this driver in several Games and no errors to find to be able,” concludes the author.

• HardwareOC: Geforce 7 Treiber Vergleich (German).
• HardwareOC: GeForce 7 Drivers Comparison (Translated).
• 3DChipset: Beta ForceWare Download.