Drivers

The Driver Quality Gap

Part of the superior 2D performance you see above is due to hardware, but driver overhead also plays a big role. That has always been a historical challenge for the driver engineers.

Now, some of you are about to flame me for not considering that ATI has made significant gains with their CATALYST drivers or noting that NVIDIA’s beta Detonator drivers have bugs that cause visual glitches and ignore the 2D performance issues. Indeed, some sites may say that I’m like an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand if I think ATI drivers are still plagued with driver issues.

These systems will spend half their time in Linux, and NVIDIA's drivers for Linux can be considered mature. ATI’s recent Catalyst 3.8 drivers should make a big improvement in Linux, but we will need some time to evaluate it.

Linux aside, in Windows, one major strength of NVIDIA’s driver set is the Matrox-like 2D feature set. In terms of dual monitor support, NVIDIA supports stretched XP desktops, HW accelerated OpenGL over spanned monitors, and per-application preferences - things that aren’t supported with ATI Hydravision. Some of the “It was useless until I needed it” features include NVRotate. This driver-level rotation works seamlessly with all applications and preserves video acceleration. ATI once tried to code rotation support into their graphics card but it hasn’t made its way back into current drivers. For anyone with a portrait mode display, NVRotate can be a Godsend as it works perfectly with a minimal performance hit.

Dual portrait display

The advantage of a portrait mode display is that it reduces scrolling - instead of relying on larger resolutions and then only using half of your landscape mode monitor, producing text too small to read, you will make more efficient use of your monitor. It has been said that 20-25% of your computing time is spent on scrolling and so this quickly adds up to lost time. Interestingly, even the dual portrait display approach that ends up producing a more traditional aspect ratio is useful. Dual vertical 17” LCD monitors is like having a 35mm aspect ratio 24.5” viewable-area monitor, and the ability to maximize windows to one screen is where you gain your productivity.

NVRotate works great with LCD panels

The new mouse features that will be launched with Detonator 50 series.

With the new ForceWare driver set, NVIDIA’s 2D feature set has grown even larger. It’s now possible to “throw” windows to the screen edges and although this needs some tweaking, it’s quickly become a standard feature I use every day. Gesture-computing is also present - you can program the drivers to locate your cursor when you shake the mouse around, make rotation of your mouse trigger a special command. The gestures are most useful when working with multiple virtual desktops, but these are the kinds of tools you need to use to really appreciate. It’s like trying to describe the WASD+mouse layout to someone currently using the arrow keys+mouse - simply saying that the ability to map weapons to nearby letters is better doesn’t fully quantify the experience.

Bottom line? Choosing which video card deserves to be in your system is clearly a personal decision because there are more variables than driver stability or 2D performance. Some of the FiringSquad staff use NVIDIA in their personal machines and some use ATI in their personal machines. For this system, however, we’re running GeForce FX 5900 Ultra.

[At the end of the day, Alan and I agreed that ATI is currently running better in DX9 benchmarks, but in light of the issues that we’ve encountered with IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles, Flight Simulator 2004, and NASCAR 2003/i875P performance at low resolutions with ATI’s CATALYST drivers, we feel that NVIDIA hardware is generally more compatible with a wider variety of applications/platforms, which is also very important - Ed]