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Detonator 52.16 Driver Report November 05, 2003 Brandon Bell |
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Summary: NVIDIA launched its ForceWare driver suite to go along with last month's GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and GeForce FX 5700 Ultra launches. These new drivers promised a lot, with a new compiler and a few other performance optimizations. In this article we take a look at NVIDIA's latest driver, read up on all the new features, performance enhancements and more inside. If you own a GeForce2/3/4/FX card (or plan on buying one in the near future), this is one article you won't want to miss!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 16 ) |
New compiler
While NVIDIA’s Detonator drivers have officially supported the GeForce FX line of DX9 GPUs for the past several months, NVIDIA’s software team has still been busy catching up to the hardware. We first hinted at this in our MSI GeForce FX5900-TD128 review where we stated: “The Detonator team is definitely under more scrutiny to deliver however. After the controversy surrounding 3DMark, NVIDIA’s driver team will be under more pressure than ever to provide high performance along with the stability and compatibility NVIDIA’s drivers are traditionally known for. It won’t be an easy task, but NVIDIA’s engineers have definitely delivered hardware that is superior to what they had at the beginning of this year. It will now be up to the Detonator team to expose all of NV35’s potential power.” Sounds like a subtle statement doesn’t it? But the key phrase is “expose all of NV35’s potential power”.
Up until just recently, we couldn’t officially elaborate on that statement without getting into serious trouble with NVIDIA’s legal department. You see, the driver we used for that review, Detonator 44.03, did not take advantage of a new compiler NVIDIA has been working on. For the past year, NVIDIA has been quietly assembling a compiler team, with engineers whose roots come from the world of CPUs. The team will eventually consist of 50 people with experience ranging from AltiVec, to 3DNow! and SSE.
NVIDIA’s compiler was first implemented in Detonator 44.12, but it was still fairly rudimentary. As its name implies, NVIDIA’s Detonator 50 series takes advantage of their next generation compiler, which has been optimized for even more performance.
These optimizations take several forms. For instance, the new compiler takes standard API calls and translates them into code better suited for the NV3x architecture. This is important, as early DX9 benchmarks with 3DMark, Tomb Raider, and Half-Life 2 has shown NVIDIA’s weakness in these DX9 applications when optimizations aren’t in place. Since NVIDIA hardware tends to prefer longer shader instructions, the compiler can translate shorter pixel shader programs that require multiple passes into longer programs that require fewer passes. The compiler has also been designed to minimize register usage (a topic that has received a fair amount of discussion since ATI’s Shader Day event). NVIDIA has been working with Microsoft on a new PS_2a path that’s optimized for the NV3x architecture to help make this invisible to the end user.
In addition, the Detonator 50 driver includes a new instruction scheduler, which rearranges the order of instructions to better suit NVIDIA hardware (with different optimizations for FX 5900, FX 5600, FX 5200). This subtle change can have a huge impact on NVIDIA’s shader performance.
Finally, the new Detonator driver contains an assortment of hand-tuned shaders. Some of these are shader fragments for shader functions that are commonly used, while others are shaders that have been adapted for particular shading models.
The key sticking point to all these optimizations is increasing performance without reducing image quality. After all, the most critical aspect to new 2.0 pixel and vertex shaders are the jaw-dropping visuals they’re capable of providing. Right now there are only a handful of titles in existence that take advantage of 2.0 shaders, even titles which were just recently released such as Call of Duty (which employs some shaders despite being based on the Quake 3 engine) and Max Payne 2 still utilize 1.x shaders. So while we can show you some of the ramifications of this today, you really won’t see the entire scope of things until next year when titles that use thousands of 2.0 shaders ship.
We’re going to put this new compiler to the test in existing DX9 games such as Halo and Tomb Raider, while we’ve also included results with ShaderMark 2.0 to test theoretical performance, but first lets take a look at some of the other new features NVIDIA has incorporated into Detonator 52.16.
SIDEBAR: NVIDIA’s ForceWare 52.16 page
| More changes | Page:: ( 2 / 16 ) |
NVIDIA’s Detonator 50 drivers are about more than just a new compiler and scheduler, which solely benefit GeForce FX users. NVIDIA has also incorporated a few new additions that will benefit all NVIDIA card owners. The most obvious change is the new user interface for the control panel, and nView 3.0.
Updated user interface
First, the new interface isn’t as dramatic as the change between Detonator 30 and Detonator 40; rather NVIDIA has modified the look of some of its menus in Detonator 50, as well as adding new settings such as the “image sharpening” setting under the color correction menu for GeForce FX users.
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The most talked about change is the updated “Performance and Quality Settings” menu. NVIDIA maintains the generic “High Performance”, “Performance”, and “Quality” settings, which will use predefined settings for aspects like texture quality (unfortunately, end users still aren’t able to manually toggle these functions like you can with ATI hardware) with the default setting being “Quality”.
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One new feature however, is the “Application-controlled” setting for anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. In theory, this setting leaves both of these functions in the hands of the particular application you’re running. So if you have anisotropic filtering enabled in say, Unreal Tournament 2003, you’ll get anisotropic filtering in UT 2003. Unfortunately however, this isn’t the case, as we found in our recent image quality article that Detonator 52.16 still uses its pseudo-trilinear filtering in this app, and it appears all Direct3D applications.
This is particularly disappointing as NVIDIA has stated on multiple occasions that they would be implementing an application mode into Detonator 50 to address these concerns. Well, they put the button for application mode in there, but apparently it’s nothing more than a mask in its current form, leading many to openly joke about the irony of the new “ForceWare” label, as the new driver literally forces NVIDIA’s pseudo-trilinear mode upon its users.
An application setting will become even more important in the future, as DX9 titles that will ship this year and into 2004 (including OpenGL titles such as DOOM 3) will offer built-in settings for anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing. Slowly but surely manipulating these settings will become more prevalent in the games themselves, rather than in the driver’s control panel. Therefore, getting this feature implemented needs to be a larger priority than it has been to date for NVIDIA.
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SIDEBAR: Detonator 50 Release Notes
| nView/Compatibility | Page:: ( 3 / 16 ) |
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nView 3.0
One of the key changes to nView 3.0 is the new gridlines feature. With it, you can more effectively control the real estate on your monitor’s screen by dividing your monitor up into separate regions. Gridlines are used to accomplish this.
Simply enable display gridlines in the user interface menu of nView, then define the grids with your mouse, your monitor can be split up into as many as four regions if you own a GeForce card, Quadro cards supports up to nine regions.
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The size of the grids is totally up to the end user, as they’re defined entirely with the mouse, so you could make two thinner grids at the top of your monitor, and two larger ones at the bottom (or vice versa) or if you’d rather just split your monitor in half you can do that too.
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NVIDIA documentation refers to them as sub-monitors, which effectively describes what the grid lines do. You can use them to quickly reposition applications, which is helpful when multitasking; this is accomplished by sending windows to a grid. Another added benefit is that you can quickly resize windows, as the area of the grids is defined when you initially setup the gridlines.
NVIDIA’s nView 3.0 documentation also describes a new pop-up blocker for Internet Explorer users (perfect for those of you like me who like to hit up ESPN.com on a daily basis), but unfortunately we couldn’t find it.
Bug report
We’ve had a few weeks to play with the new 52.16 drivers, and in our experience, they’re pretty reliable across a broad range of software applications and hardware. That doesn’t mean that they’re perfect though. One FS reader, Bjorn Larsen sent in a few screenshots with Splinter Cell that shows lighting issues in the game (his screenshots were taken with an MSI GeForce FX 5900-TD128 card):
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We haven’t run into this with any of our custom Splinter Cell demos, so our test results are unaffected, but it was still something we wanted to report on. We’ve also seen reports of problems with NVIDIA’s new nView software where DualView and/or Windows desktop settings aren’t saved after the system is rebooted.
One issue that was somewhat alarming to us however was our inability to get our reference GeForce FX 5200 Ultra card to work properly with ForceWare 52.16. For whatever reason, the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra’s fan does not operate when 52.16 is installed on our testbed system. As a result, after a few minutes of gaming, the card would begin to overheat, frame rates would quickly taper off or the system would behave erratically, and eventually the testbed would either crash or reboot itself. A quick re-install of Detonator 45.23 would resolve this issue, so we’re convinced that the driver is the culprit.
If you recall our GeForce FX 5800 Ultra preview, we ran into similar issues with beta Detonator drivers, where the card would occasionally underclock itself after overheating (particularly in certain software applications) although in that case the FX Flow cooling system was always operating properly and the system would never crash.
This issue is particularly troubling to us because you could potentially damage your graphics card. In NVIDIA’s defense, it’s possible that this may be an isolated case that just affects our reference card, as we haven’t seen this reported anywhere else anecdotally or in online forums. We informed NVIDIA of this issue late last week but haven’t received an official response.
SIDEBAR: ForceWare 52.16 still has the overclocking button first introduced with Detonator 40, just use the Coolbits registry hack to enable overclocking.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 4 / 16 ) |
System Setup
Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz
ASUS P4C800 Deluxe
512MB OCZ EL PC3200 (DDR400) SDRAM
ASUS V9950 Ultra (GeForce FX 5900 Ultra)
eVGA e-GeForce FX 5600 Ultra
MSI GeForce FX5600-VTDR128
MSI GeForce FX5200-VTDR128
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200-8X
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti
NVIDIA GeForce3
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX460
Driver version Detonator 52.16
Driver version Detonator 45.23
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 9.0b
Benchmarks
ShaderMark 2.0
NASCAR Racing 2003 Season (Bristol custom demo)
Quake III: Arena version 1.32 (fscrusher demo)
Unreal Tournament 2003 (T2 custom demo)
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (The Black Death track)
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
Halo: Combat Evolved PC
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (Beyond3D custom demo)
SIDEBAR: All games represented here are patched to their latest version.
| ShaderMark 2.0 | Page:: ( 5 / 16 ) |
ShaderMark 2.0
Notes
To see what kind of performance enhancements NVIDIA’s ForceWare 52.16 drivers bring, we loaded up ShaderMark 2.0 with anti-detect mode enabled. As you can see, shader performance has increased substantially in some cases with the new drivers across the board.
While the new Detonator driver does expose one additional test, there are still quite a few functions within ShaderMark 2.0 that the GeForce FX cards are still incapable of performing, the most notable tests being HDR.
SIDEBAR: NVIDIA has a white paper on its new compiler here.
| NASCAR Racing 2003 Season | Page:: ( 6 / 16 ) |
Nascar 2003: OpenGL (for NV cards)
Notes
Regrettably, we saw a performance dropoff with the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra/ForceWare 52.16 combination in NASCAR 2003. Fortunately, this was isolated to 800x600, if you own a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra card, chances are you’re going to be playing NASCAR Racing 2003 at 1024x768 or 1280x1024 with the high quality settings we used, so this isn’t a huge issue. The GeForce2 Ti card actually saw a slight performance boost at 800x600 and 1024x768.
For everything else, performance was basically unchanged.
SIDEBAR: Besides the new motherboard and graphics driver, another new software program in NVIDIA’s ForceWare software suite is the new System Utility.
| IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles | Page:: ( 7 / 16 ) |
IL-2 Sturmovik: FB: OpenGL
Notes
Like NASCAR Racing 2003, we saw a slight performance drop in IL-2:Forgotten Battles with the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra card, although this time we saw it persist at the higher resolutions as well. This is a little more worrisome, as the higher resolutions are the settings you’re more likely to use if you own one of these cards. Keep in mind however, that we haven’t enabled AA or AF, as we did in NASCAR 2003, which will account for some of the difference. The GeForce4 Ti 4600 also sees a slight performance decrease at 800x600.
Other than those differences, there’s nothing particularly startling to report.
SIDEBAR: You can read up on NVIDIA’s new overclocking utility at their nZone website.
| Quake III 4xAA 8xAF | Page:: ( 8 / 16 ) |
Quake III - OpenGL
Notes
Unlike the previous games, we see some nice performance increases in Quake 3, with the gains coming to the GeForce4 and GeForce FX 5600 and FX 5900 cards. The star next to the GeForce4 MX and GeForce2 denotes that the boards aren’t running with 8xAF, a setting which isn’t supported by older NVIDIA hardware.
The gain is roughly 5% for GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, and a slightly more modest 4% for GeForce FX 5600/5600 Ultra. GeForce4 cards see improvements of up to 6%.
SIDEBAR: Call of Duty was just recently released for the PC, as we mentioned at the outset this title is based on a modified version of id Software’s four-year old Q3 engine.
| Unreal Tournament 2003 4xAA | Page:: ( 9 / 16 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 – Direct3D
Notes
Like Quake 3, we see some slight performance improvements in UT 2003 with 4x anti-aliasing enabled. In this case however, the GeForce FX 5200/5200 Ultra take the place of the GeForce4 cards, which don’t see any gains beyond 800x600.
GeForce FX 5600/5600 Ultra performance improves by roughly 6%, while the GeForce FX 5200 family benefits a little more, roughly 8-10% depending on the resolution. Keep in mind that we didn’t run all tests with the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra due to the aforementioned problems we discovered with the fan. Quite simply it got to the point where we were rebooting so often testing became pretty unbearable with this combination (our UT demo we use for testing is fairly long, which is why we had a hard time completing runs).
SIDEBAR: Unfortunately, UT 2004 was recently delayed until 2004. Looks like we’ll be using UT 2003 a little bit longer.
| UT 2003 4xAA 8xAF | Page:: ( 10 / 16 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003
Notes
With AF enabled in addition to 4xAA, we’re still seeing gains, particularly with the GeForce FX 5200 and GeForce FX 5600 families, the margins are also roughly the same.
SIDEBAR: Don’t forget to check out Jakub’s report on NVIDIA’s Editor’s Day. It contains some interesting quotes from Epic’s Tim Sweeney (among others).
| Splinter Cell | Page:: ( 11 / 16 ) |
Splinter Cell – Direct3D
Notes
Interestingly enough, we see gains with the GeForce4 DX8 cards, but not the newer GeForce FX cards in Splinter Cell. The boost ranges from anywhere from 4-7% depending on the GeForce4 card tested and the resolution used. It’s always nice to see gains in hardware that’s nearly two years old.
SIDEBAR: EB currently has a shipping date of 3/14/2004 for Splinter Cell 2 PC, can’t wait!
| Tomb Raider w/o DOF | Page:: ( 12 / 16 ) |
Tomb Raider – Direct3D
Notes
As was hinted in our ShaderMark results, the new ForceWare 52.16 drivers bring some significant performance improvements to DX9 applications like Tomb Raider. We’re looking at double-digit gains here folks! The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra’s performance improves in the mid teens while the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra lies roughly in the high teens. Meanwhile GeForce FX 5600 sees gains of up to 20%.
The only card that doesn’t seem to see any improvements is the GeForce FX 5200, which isn’t too surprising considering its hardware limitations.
SIDEBAR: NVIDIA’s Detonator 50 drivers were unleashed almost exactly one year after Detonator 40.
| Tomb Raider w/ DOF | Page:: ( 13 / 16 ) |
Tomb Raider – Direct3D
Notes
Depth-of-Field is one setting in Tomb Raider that comes with a huge performance hit, which is why we’ve previously disabled it in our testing, even though it’s enabled by default. We decided to include test results with depth-of-field enabled for this article to see if the performance hit has been reduced, thankfully it has, although slightly.
For instance, with Detonator 45.23, the performance hit was 43% at 1024x768 with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, and an astounding 61% with GeForce FX 5600 Ultra. With ForceWare 52.16, that figure is reduced to 38% and 60%. This still isn’t enough to make this setting playable for GeForce FX 5600/5600 Ultra users, but the enhanced performance is definitely a boost for GeForce FX 5900 Ultra.
SIDEBAR: The GeForce FX 5200 cards don’t support depth-of-field.
| Halo | Page:: ( 14 / 16 ) |
In order to examine the performance benefits of the new ForceWare drivers in DX9 applications, we decided to relax our benchmarking standards a bit and include benchmark results with Halo. In a normal review, we wouldn’t include Halo results, as its benchmark mode is based entirely on letterbox cut scenes taken from various introduction sequences between chapters within the game. This can be a bit misleading, as the demos don’t always consist of actual gameplay. And since the game has no built-in demo recording functionality (yet), the only other way to obtain results is to run through a given level and record framerate with FRAPS. This has the drawback that you’ll never run through the level the same way twice, and is complicated even further if you have any sequences with combat – what if an enemy lobs a grenade at you in one run, but turns and runs (something the AI will do in Halo) in another? Your frame rate will vary even more drastically. And of course, don’t forget that pesky AI, which is always quietly lurking in the background, as well as any physics calculations that may be necessary should one of your foes take a leap due to a well-placed grenade.
Fortunately Gearbox will be releasing a patch that will enable demo recording for multiplayer games. This will be great when it arrives, but it isn’t here yet. We’ve been patiently waiting for this patch, but we decided to make an exception for this article. If you don’t trust the Halo results because they’re based on cut scenes which don’t always reflect real gameplay, or the fact that the cut scenes themselves could be highly susceptible to questionable driver optimizations similar to the ones seen with 3DMark 03 earlier this year, feel free to click over to the conclusion. Now that we’ve got the disclaimer out of the way, lets take a look at the results.
Halo – Direct3D
Notes
One of the cool features of Halo is that it not only gives you the average frame rate, it can also give you the percentage of time spent at a particular frame rate, and the percentage of frames at a given frame rate. We’ve decided to take the results from three sample points: below 60 frames per second, below 30 frames per second, and below 15 frames per second. Unlike traditional graphs however, lower scores are better, as the less time you spend below a given threshold (such as 15 frames per second), the higher your overall performance.
Based on our results at 640x480, performance improves drastically with Detonator 52.16. GeForce FX 5900 Ultra’s performance improves by 19%, while both GeForce FX 5600 cards see improvements of 33%. The GeForce FX 5200 Ultra’s average frame rate is 29% better, while GeForce FX 5200 sees a 31% gain.
According to the new graphs as a result of the new driver, the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra’s frame rate never dips below 15 fps, with Detonator 45.23 this occurred in 6% of the frames. GeForce FX 5200 Ultra also never dips below 15 fps. Note that we don’t have these results for GeForce FX 5600 at 640x480.
SIDEBAR: What do you think of the new way we’re presenting Halo benchmarks? Speak up in the news comments!
| Halo (cont’d) | Page:: ( 15 / 16 ) |
Notes
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra’s Halo’s performance is enhanced by 25% at 1024x768, while GeForce FX 5600 Ultra nearly doubles! We see performance gains of 1.5 times for GeForce FX 5200 and GeForce FX 5600 as well.
Only 47% of the 4700 frames within the Halo benchmark were below 30 frames per second with GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, an improvement of nearly two times. Meanwhile, GeForce FX 5900 Ultra’s performance improves by 2.5 times in that category.
Notes
The margins at 1280x1024 remain the same across all boards, which is a good thing because we saw some pretty drastic performance improvements. The figures that really stand out are the dramatic reductions below 15 fps, GeForce FX 5900 Ultra goes from 10% of its frames below that magic number, to 1%. GeForce FX 5600 Ultra sees an improvement of 3X in that category (although keep in mind that we’re still looking at a 16 fps average). The GeForce FX 5600 and especially the FX 5200 are too taxed to see the gains of the 5900 Ultra and 56000 Ultra, 1280x1024 is just too high of a resolution for these cards.
SIDEBAR: I’m seriously considering dropping all DX7 cards for the next Detonator article, as well as possibly the Ti 4200. With the arrival of the FX 5950 and FX 5700 we need to make space for those cards.
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 16 / 16 ) |
DirectX 7 card owners
Life’s been tough for you guys recently, as more and more DX8, and now DX9, titles are shipping. We figure you’re still holding out because the titles you’re playing run fine with your current hardware. That’s a good argument when DX8 level cards are expensive, but with GeForce4 Ti 4200s selling under $100 online at some vendors, it’s getting harder each day to live with “okay” graphics, especially with titles such as Deus Ex: Invisible War right around the corner. And as you saw in this driver report, other than a mild speed boost in NASCAR, this driver isn’t going to help your performance.
The new nView features are a nice addition, but oh, that’s right, unless you have a GeForce2 MX or GeForce4 MX, you don’t have nView. Fortunately we’ve got some good news for you, ForceWare 52.16’s gridlines feature does work with GeForce2 Ti so you will be able to take advantage of this feature. Otherwise, we really can’t recommend this driver for you.
Editor's Note: nView 3.0 software is installed for all NVIDIA graphics cards ranging from the RIVA TNT to GeForce FX when you upgrade to ForceWare 52.16. All desktop management features are available, although older hardware does not support TwinView.
DirectX 8 card owners
We saw some tangible performance gains with GeForce4 Ti 4200 and GeForce4 Ti 4600, which was pretty surprising considering NVIDIA has essentially had two years to tweak their drivers for these cards. The performance improvements aren’t as substantial as some of the ones you’ve seen in the past from previous driver releases, but they’re not something to quickly dismiss either, Splinter Cell and Quake 3 both saw some nice gains.
Check out these new drivers, play around with the new 2D features, and guess what, you don’t have to worry about NVIDIA’s pseudo-trilinear in D3D applications! GeForce4 runs AF just fine with UT 2003.
DirectX 9 card owners
Based on the performance improvements we saw in DX9 applications such as Tomb Raider, Halo, and ShaderMark, we’d have to say that these drivers are a must have upgrade. 30% performance boosts are nothing to scoff at after all.
However, NVIDIA’s filtering in D3D applications and the cooling issue we encountered with GeForce FX 5200 Ultra does leave us very concerned. If you don’t find yourself playing Halo or Tomb Raider everyday, you may want to wait this driver release out until it’s been battle-tested a little bit longer. Detonator 44.03 certainly didn’t last long. Also, we highly recommend GeForce FX 5200 Ultra owners keep a very close eye on their card's fan if they plan to upgrade to 52.16. If you find that your fan does not operate after upgrading to 52.16, revert back to 45.23 immediately. The new features and performance gains seen here just aren't worth the risk of potentially damaging your hardware.
The new compiler in ForceWare 52.16 is one giant leap in the right direction as far as performance is concerned, and brings GeForce FX owners one step closer to fully exposing the true capabilities of their hardware. This is the biggest reason for GeForce FX owners to upgrade, consider the new additions in nView 3.0 as an added bonus.
SIDEBAR: What do you think of NVIDIA’s new ForceWare drivers? Has your upgrade experience been a pleasant one, or do you regret the day they ever sat on your hard drive? Share your results in the news comments!