Introduction

Update

As promised, we have numbers for the 5.32. The graphs contain numbers comparing the 5.22, 5.30 and 5.32 Detonator drivers.

Late?

We got wind of the 5.30 Detonator and figured a .08 increase must mean something. While not as large a jump as the 3.xx to 5.xx, it still deserves a looksee. After all something has to have changed.

Normally we don't see massive performance increases with most of these leaked drivers. But every now and then some stellar stuff pops out and it amazes us all. Take for instance the 5.08s. When that came along we got a whole bunch of new toys to play with. FSAA and S3TC made their debut in that set of drivers. For those that don't know S3TC is a texture compression method created by S3. FSAA is full scene anti-aliasing. This feature, to date, has been characterized with massive performance hits. The visual benefits are enormous though. NVIDIA has also had some pretty lackluster performance when it comes to D3D FSAA.

Along with access to the new features, we got a very very hefty increase in performance. Some systems experienced performance spikes as large as 30%! Showing it is quite beneficial for us to look at these leaked driver sets, as the official releases are far and between.

A Few Notes

As far as we could tell no new features were added to the 5.30. For the OpenGL FSAA settings you must change the registry setting FSAAquality to a value from 0 to 2. We did notice that setting 1 of the registry entry FSAAquality no longer seems to make a difference. As a result we used the 0 and 2 values for the tests. For D3D settings we used slider positions 2 and 4 for the FSAA tests.

Where Do the Days Go?

Another day another leaked driver. Just as I was finished getting all the numbers and whatnot done I got wind that the 5.32 had somehow snuck out into the hands of the waiting public. Needless to say, we will have numbers up for those.