Official Detonator 40.xx Feedback Thread

[volt]

Just a thought. Why do people care so much about 3DMark. It's just a synthetic benchmark and a war of "scores". I would worry more about how games perform rather how many points I gain heh

Haven't installed 40's yet, though I will when I get to my rig

[John Reynolds]

Originally posted by pelly
IQ hasn't really been an issue as of late, as NVIDIA has really come on-track and is on par with their competition.......I'd be surprised to see NVIDIA release a driver with decreases in performance.



Score increases mean ( to me ) that I am getting extra mileage out of my purchase. Essentially, you are getting a free upgrade.

Umm, not necessarily. No one said the performance will decrease. What I did write is that performance increases mean nothing until IQ has been carefully examined (double-checked). IQ has been an issue as of late because there's been strange changes in the texture LOD from driver to driver (strange in my mind since these changes certainly shouldn't be occurring on an architecture this mature and on the market for this long). Moreover, 3DMark scores really mean very little since there's no enforced IQ baseline in the benchmark itself. . .users are free to tweak and twiddle anything under the sun.

Having said the above, as a GF4 owner I definitely hope there is a substantial performance boost with no IQ loss in all games. But I'm just a wee-bit skeptical that a real 25% boost can be pulled out this late in a product's lifespan.

[Smokey]

K so far so good, but has anyone got a refresh rate fix for this Ive looked in the nv4 file but cant see any refresh rates.

[imtim83]

Quake 3 arena works fine for me! i know you have some setting wrong in quake 3 arena. If you go to the latest 1.31 point release it should reset those setting if you wanted to do it that way.

[Sinister]

Heck people, could you PLEEEEASE be clear about which are our rigs? I have a Ti500, and want to figure out first, based in your reports, if it´s going to be worth it for me!!!


Rodrigo

[saturnotaku]

Originally posted by d1rX
Just a thought. Why do people care so much about 3DMark. It's just a synthetic benchmark and a war of "scores". I would worry more about how games perform rather how many point I gain heh

D@mn straight. I don't know about anyone else, but my OpenGL gaming performance as well as impact on GTA3 are going to be my own personal benchmarks for determining the worthiness of these drivers. And I can't wait.

[kill`em`all]

Like everyone else has said, you need to go into Add/Remove and choose Nvidia Display Adaptors (mine was 140meg!) and remove everything, right back to VGA driver. Then reboot and choose the Nvidia 40.41 drivers.

I was sceptical at first about the performance but my two benchmarks (quake2 and rtcw) give me a good idea how a driver performs and 40.41 is a keeper!.

p3 + geforce3 ti200

I tried quake2 @ 1024x768 32bit demo1.dm2
30.82=247fps
40.41=259fps

I tried rtcw @ 1024x768 32bit checkpoint
30.82= 77fps
40.41= 87fps

http://www.3dcht4u.de/3dc/5zdg5w/rtcw-checkpoint.zip is the benchmark I use for testing out the new display drivers. You will need to rename the extension to dm_59 for wolfmp 1.33. I have a bench.cfg in my wolf\main directory which basically does this to save time typing..

timedemo 1
demo checkpoint

http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp

[JonathanM]

hmmm i'm missing the device selection and color correction tabs here... quite odd.

IMPORTANT

It is strongly recommended to uninstall previous versions of the Detonator Drivers, reboot, and then do a clean install.

This helps eliminate many of the problems some users are experiencing with the new 40.41 drivers such as:
- ultra-high monitor refresh rates becoming available,
- problems accessing the nVidia tab in the advanced Display Properties control panel,
- problems relating to nView settings, etc.

Cheers,

-- Jeex

[pelly]

Let me address this current trend of dismissing 3dMark...Personally, I do not live by benchmark numbers and I do not brag to everyone about my scores. However, I do feel that they represent solid information regarding the performance of my system.

Here, I can witness the weight each component has upon the overall system performance. ( ie: CPU scaling and/or differences between graphic cards )

If there is a large jump in performance in 3dMark, I think it is safe to assume that there will be a good jump in performance across the boards with games. Granted, some will be effected more than others. My point is that they generally all have performance increases.

3dMark is great when you don't have the time to fire-up half a dozen games or so and you just want to see if there are any major changes. In this case, there are and I am a happy camper because of it.

[kill`em`all]

Fire up regedt32.exe and head create a new DWORD called CoolBits under

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak]
"CoolBits"=dword:00000003

This lets you turn off VSYNC for direct3d games/applications

[MikeC]

Originally posted by d1rX
Thanks Mike. Will we see a review of some sort by the way ?

I had no idea that new drivers would be released today. If I had been given a weeks notice, I would have certainly written a review.

I'll do some testing during the next couple of days and post my results in the news. But I'm pretty excited to get home from work today