Introduction

Detonator 5.08

Yesterday, our GXNetwork affiliate, Reactor Critical put up a new set of Win95/98 NVIDIA 5.08 beta drivers. Sure, new NVIDIA drivers are leaked every other week, but most aren't even worth downloading. Once in a while there are new drivers that are worth downloading. The new Detonator 5.08 drivers offer new features and performance gains, and we definitely needed to take a look at why the version jumped from 3.X all the way to 5.08.

S3TC

We'd heard rumors for weeks that NVIDIA was soon going to support OpenGL S3 Texture Compression. Yes, S3TC is free in DX7, but S3 charges a licensing fee for OpenGL S3TC. These new 5.08 drivers feature S3TC support in OpenGL. Now, NVIDIA may have actually paid the licensing fee, but… as you may remember, NVIDIA and S3 entered into a cross-licensing agreement about a month ago.

Without texture compression

With texture compression

With and without S3TC

The drivers automatically enable texture compression (r_ext_compress_textures) in Quake 3. The image degradation is noticeable, especially in the sky, but enabling texture compression will help memory bandwidth and solve stuttering problems.

FSAA

Another new feature available in the 5.08 is full screen anti-aliasing (FSAA). Isn't FSAA 3dfx's domain? Yes. 3dfx has been hyping up FSAA and the T-buffer for months now, but NVIDIA has quietly enabled FSAA in these beta drivers. Now the question is whether or not your NVIDIA card has the fill rate to support FSAA. We've found that enabling FSAA causes a sizable performance hit, but the benefits are easily seen. We're currently trying to confirm what kind of AA the drivers perform (it's probably supersampling). Take a look at our screenshots.

Without and with AA

The Quake 3 screenshot function did give us a couple peculiar problems with the new drivers. These AA shots were all taken with HyperSnap. You have to go into the registry to enable FSAA. Christopher Hill has the details in the NVIDIA GeForce 256 FAQ.

We ran a full set of Quake 3 benchmarks on our P3 Coppermine 750 system with a GeForce DDR. The frame rate increase between the 3.68 drivers and the 5.08 drivers is astounding -over 30% in some cases!