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DRIVERS ANALYSIS |
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XPENTOR DRIVERS ANALYSIS 01 - By Willyam Anton, Date: 21/03/2006 ForceWare 84.21 WHQL Drivers Analysis
Introduction After the release of 7900 series, several nvidia forceware beta drivers have been out for testings for a couple of weeks. Most of the betas were aimed to add support for their latest GPUs. A promising step for nVidia to improve their PureVideo technology can be seen in their latest beta drivers, however words for peformance improvements were lacking in those betas. Let us now just see how the 84.21(84.20 based) performs! ForceWare 84.21 Release Notes -WHQL Certified WindowsXP: Increased performance when playing F.E.A.R with antialiasing enabled. Test System Setup
Tests performed: Synthetic Benchmarks , Real Gaming Benchmarks and Video Quality Comparison. 3DMark 2003 - http://www.3dmark.com/products/3dmark03/
By combining full DirectX®9.0a support with completely new tests and graphics, 3DMark03 Pro continues the legacy of being the industry standard benchmark. The high quality game tests, image quality tests, sound tests and others give you an extremely accurate overview of your system’s current gaming performance. (Higher score is better)
As you can see above, there are no real difference noticed in the new drivers. (Higher score is better)
The story is a little bit different if we crank up the AA and AF to 4x/8x. The 84.21 shows the power of 100 extra 3dMark points. 3DMark 2005 - http://www.3dmark.com/products/3dmark05/
3DMark®05 is best suited for the latest generation of DirectX®9.0 graphics cards. It is the first benchmark to require a DirectX9.0 compliant hardware with support for Pixel Shaders 2.0 or higher! By combining high quality 3D tests, CPU tests, feature tests, image quality tools, and much more, 3DMark05 is a premium benchmark for evaluating the latest generation of gaming hardware. (Higher score is better)
Despite the increase points, we don't see the big difference when looking at the fps results. (Higher score is better)
Again here we see no difference in terms of performance. 3DMark 2006 - http://www.3dmark.com/products/3dmark06/
A fundamental tool for every company in the PC industry as well as PC users and gamers, 3DMark06 uses advanced real-time 3D game workloads to measure PC performance using a suite of DirectX 9 3D graphics tests, CPU tests, and 3D feature tests. 3DMark06 tests include all new HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance today. (Higher score is better)
In 3DMark 2006 we don't see a performance boost either. However, this is just a synthetic benchmarks. Let us now proceed to the real gaming environment benchmarks. F.E.A.R - http://www.whatisfear.com/us/
F.E.A.R. (First Encounter Assault Recon) is an intense combat experience with rich atmosphere and a deeply intense paranormal storyline presented entirely in first person. Be the hero in your own spine-tingling epic of action, tension, and terror… and discover the true meaning of F.E.A.R. (Higher score is better)
Only a slight improvement can be seen over here averaging for 2 more fps. (Higher score is better)
When we set it to high computer and performance details, we see a promising gain here. 10fps are gained in the average fps. Very nice indeed. NFS: Most Wanted - http://www.ea.com/official/nfs/mostwanted/us/home.jsp
ForceWare 84.21 has brought NFS:MW a more stable performance as the minimum fps rises by 12fps. However, average fps is dropped to 57. Quite a margin to consider. (Higher score is better)
In the Maximum Details settings, we found out that the 84.21 is going even more stable and stronger by outperforming 81.98 in all cases. nVidia PureVideo Quality Comparison
Images are compressed in .JPEG format and may lose of its color originality. However, you can still see the difference between the two. For a playback experience, we saw 84.21 and 1.02.196 Decoder served the best image quality compared to the 81.98. Conclusion Changes have been made to support new series of 7900, improvements made over the quality video playback that has been bottlenecking nVidia playback quality for months. Gaming performance is slightly improved. From all these we can say that 84.21 are the drivers everybody needs to download for better speed, compatibility and quality.
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