Introduction

Official?

Funny thing happened on my way to work today, NVIDIA released official drivers. The newest set is called Detonator 6.50, bringing us up a little bit from 6.31 release. Naturally, we wanted to know if there were any performance differences. The following is a comparison between the 6.50 and 6.31 driver sets, running on both Intel and AMD machines. So without wasting anymore of your time - the tests!

Test System

AMD Thunderbird 1200MHz
Abit KT7A-RAID KT133 Motherboard

Intel PIII 700MHz
Abit BE6 II BX Motherboard

Mushkin 128MB PC133 CAS2 SDRAM

Western Digital Caviar ATA-66 hard drive

NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS Ultra
Driver version: Detonator 6.31

NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS Ultra
Driver version: Detonator 6.50

Win98SE

Benchmarks

3DMark2000 1.1 - 640x480x16
3DMark2000 1.1 - 640x480x32
3DMark2000 1.1 - 800x600x16
3DMark2000 1.1 - 800x600x32
3DMark2000 1.1 - 1024x768x16
3DMark2000 1.1 - 1024x768x32

Quake 3 1.17 - 640x480 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 1.17 - 800x600 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 1.17 - 1024x768 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 1.17 - 1280x1024 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 1.17 - 1600x1275 Fastest, Normal, High Quality