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: News
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Testing To see how far these new drivers have pushed the architecture, I decided to use the GeForce FX 5800 for testing these drivers. The NV30 based cards have taken the brunt of public opinion, and I wanted to see if NVIDIA’s claims of improving overall performance were true. In the past these cards seemed to do well running in performance mode without any anisotropic filtering or anti-aliasing applied to the scene. Once those two features were enabled, performance dropped to a great degree. One of the possible reasons for this is that NVIDIA enabled some behind the scenes debugging at the driver level when the Application (Quality) setting was enabled. This looks like a valid excuse, as the performance drop off when forcing trilinear filtering with anisotropic is far more than expected. NVIDIA claims that they have removed the debugging code from the drivers, as well as tweaked the algorithms to give better speed as well as better visuals. Speed and quality top the list of features that need to be tested here. In terms of compatibility, I have not run into any problems in the time I have had these drivers for testing. The testing platform is as follows: AMD Athlon XP 2800+, Asus A7N8X Deluxe, 512 MB Corsair TwinX 3200, 60 GB Maxtor ATA 133 hard drive, Toshiba DVD-ROM, Windows XP Pro SP1, and DirectX 9.0a Visual Quality The older 43.45 drivers have a quality tab that goes from Application to Quality to Performance. Performance is speed driven, and forces an adaptive bilinear approach on applications. Quality mixes some trilinear with bilinear, so the visuals are slightly cleaner. Application forces true trilinear filtering. The new 44.03 drivers do this a bit differently. The slider bar goes the opposite way from the 43.45 drivers, and it gives new definitions to each setting. High Performance to Performance to Quality. Quality is the true trilinear setting, Performance is the mixed setting, and High Performance is the adaptive bilinear. Here are some shots: Performance/High Performance
The top picture is of the Performance setting on the 43.45 drivers, while the bottom is High Performance on the 44.03 drivers. Note that the edges between mipmap's on the top picture are a bit more filtered than the newer 44.03 drivers. These are taken with no AF applied.
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