Quake II and GL Optimizations

As you can see, Detonator yields some interesting results. In Quake II, there is no effect whatsoever from the updated drivers for either 640x480 or 800x600. In fact, Detonator scored slightly lower than the standard nVidia driver set.

As pointed out by several readers, the the ref_gl.dll statement previously made in this article was incorrect: ref_gl is an id Software wrapper that points to opengl32.dll, which in turn does point to nv4ogl.dll, where most of the GL geometry calculation takes place. If and when the Q2 executable is modified to support the new drivers (or a Q2-compatible driver set is released), we can see how effective nVidia's OpenGL optimizations are. Notice that the PII and PIII show almost exactly identical performance (even with the PII overclocked by 4Mhz on the CPU and 112Mhz on the system and AGP bus), indicating completely non-SSE enhanced code.

3DMark99 Performance

Here is where Detonator really hits the mark (double-pun not intended). 3DMark is a Direct3D testing suite that measures all of the significant features of today's 3D cards, from multitexturing to fill rate to image quality. Here, we see a performance increase of roughly 15% for both the Pentium II and the Pentium III. The Pentium II keeps up quite nicely with the PIII, most likely due to the slight overclocking to 112Mhz FSB on the Pentium II.

In 3DMark as well, there is no perceivable performance difference from moving to the new drivers on a PIII vs. a PII. With SSE optimizations, you would expect the PIII to experience a greater percentage gain, roughly 15-25% higher than that of an equivalent PII. However, seeing that this is not the case, two possibilities present themselves. One, the new drivers do not take advantage of SSE, or two, 3DMark's execution time is not holed up in the display driver, reducing the impact of such optimizations. There's also a question of support for SSE in the operating system, which was supposed to be implemented in DirectX6.1. Again, if anyone finds significant performance gains on a PIII as opposed to a PII, please let us know.