NVIDIA RIVA TNT Detonator Drivers

Introduction

Since the release of their OpenGL driver for the RIVA 128, NVIDIA has been regarded for their ability to tweak their drivers to get extra performance. On February 8th, 1999, NVIDIA released a new set of RIVA TNT drivers. Along with this release was a claim of a 30% increase in performance. Do these drivers really improve performance? If so, by how much?

The Numbers

Incoming 16-bit

	STB Velocity 4400	ELSA ERAZOR II	STB Velocity 4400 w/ Detonator Drivers
640x480	84.18	84.49	74.39
800x600	72.89	69.44	73.35
1024x768	46.81	44.42	55.03

Interestingly, the 640x480 score on the Detonator drivers is strangely low. However, there is a significant gain in 1024x768 when using the new drivers.

Incoming 32-bit

	STB Velocity 4400	ELSA ERAZOR II	STB Velocity 4400 w/ Detonator Drivers
640x480	65.3	64.83	70.24
800x600	43.48	43.07	48.14
1024x768	26.11	26.18	31.35

These results show another strong point of the new drivers, 32-bit performance.

 

Quake II Demo1.dm2 16-bit

	STB Velocity 4400	ELSA ERAZOR II	STB Velocity 4400 w/ Detonator Drivers
640x480	72.7	73	73.2
800x600	58.9	56.7	61.1
1024x768	38.1	36.8	40
1152x864	30.7	29.5	31.9

Quake II Crusher.dm2 16-bit

	STB Velocity 4400	ELSA ERAZOR II	STB Velocity 4400 w/ Detonator Drivers
640x480	37	37	44.1
800x600	36.3	35.8	42.5
1024x768	30.4	29.1	32.8
1152x864	25.6	24.4	26.9

Quake II Demo1.dm2 32-bit

	STB Velocity 4400	ELSA ERAZOR II	STB Velocity 4400 w/ Detonator Drivers
640x480	60.1	55.8	60.6
800x600	41.7	38.9	48.8
1024x768	25	23.5	29.5
1152x864	20.4	19.3	23.1

Quake II Crusher.dm2 32-bit

	STB Velocity 4400	ELSA ERAZOR II	STB Velocity 4400 w/ Detonator Drivers
640x480	33.1	34	43.7
800x600	30	28.6	38.7
1024x768	20	18.7	25.3
1152x864	14.1	13.3	18.7

Conclusion:

These new drivers seem to offer a considerable increase in most situations. These drivers do especially well in the CPU intensive Crusher demo, this would seem to indicate that the new drivers have less overhead, which would free up the CPU to send more information to the video card. These new drivers seem to provide, on average, about a 10 to 25% increase over the drivers that shipped with the Velocity 4400. You can get the new drivers from RivaZone or Tweak3D .

Test Conditions:

All tests are performed on Windows 98, with DirectX 6 installed unless otherwise noted. The tests are performed three times each, then averaged together.  All tests are also performed with V-Sync set to off.

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