ForceWare 53.03 Driver Report December 29, 2003 Brandon Sandman Bell

Introduction

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NVIDIA’s ForceWare 53.03 release arrived with little fanfare earlier this month. This was due in part because the driver had already been available for quite some time on the Internet; a handful of NVIDIA’s board partners had already provided ForceWare 53.03 for release on their respective websites. No PR statements or announcements were made at the time the driver was originally released by these manufacturers, but it’s essentially the same driver that has provided on NVIDIA's website (with the sole addition being WHQL certification on the official NVIDIA driver).

As a result, these drivers have been thoroughly dissected in newsgroups and message boards throughout the ‘net, but we still wanted to take a look at them.

NVIDIA’s Release Highlights for ForceWare 53.03 mention “Increased graphics performance when using nForce3 systems.” But we actually found some performance improvements on our 875P test bed. Of course, the other major addition was official support for the GeForce FX 5900 XT, which we reviewed earlier this month in the form of eVGA’s e-GeForce FX 5900 SE.

However if you look a little further in ForceWare 53.03’s documents, you’ll find a few more interesting tidbits in the v53.03 Release Notes. For instance, on page 5 NVIDIA notes it has “re-enabled NVIDIA’s compiler technology for 3DMark 03 Patch 340 performance” as an “issue resolved” in v53.03. If you recall, FutureMark released a patch for 3DMark 03 (Patch 340), that, according to FutureMark’s Tero Sarkkinen, was released in order to “make sure that our customers can get an objective 3DMark03 performance comparison with the latest hardware and drivers. Our customers will be able to perform apples-to-apples performance comparisons between the various IHVs’ graphics cards.” FutureMark went on to state that:

“Parts of the program code have been changed so that possible 3DMark03 specific optimizations in current drivers will not work. 3DMark03 specific optimizations in drivers are against run rules of 3DMark03, because they invalidate the performance measurement results and thus make it impossible to compare performances of different hardware. A list of drivers that have been tested - and confirmed to produce valid 3DMark03 scores - has been published on Futuremark’s website.”

Of course, Patch 340 has only been approved for use with ForceWare 52.16. If you look over FutureMark’s list of approved drivers, you’ll see that ForceWare 53.03 has not been approved by FutureMark, while ATI’s CATALYST 3.9 and CATALYST 3.10 have, despite the fact that CATALYST 3.10 was released over a week after ForceWare 53.03.

With NVIDIA’s suggestion that Patch 340 disables their compiler, and FutureMark’s counter that it doesn’t, we probably haven’t seen the end of this story. Whether or not either company takes this issue public or not is another story however, we’ve already seen the two sides quarreling over this issue earlier this year. This is a subject that may possibly go well into 2004 before both sides come to an agreement, if at all.

Other than this topic, the other big issue is Battlefield 1942, specifically the popular Desert Combat mod. NVIDIA has resolved the rendering issues present in 52.16, but the problems with Splinter Cell’s shadow buffer mode we first mentioned in our Detonator 52.16 driver report are still present. We run all of our Splinter Cell tests in “projector” mode in order to run apples-to-apples comparisons with ATI cards, so shadows and dynamic lights render correctly for our benchmarking tests.

A growing number of NVIDIA users are complaining about this issue however, as the shadow buffer mode is offered exclusively to NVIDIA card users, but currently doesn’t work.



SIDEBAR: Download the ForceWare drivers for Windows XP here.

Test Systems

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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 4600
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti
NVIDIA GeForce3
Driver version Detonator 52.16
Driver version Detonator 53.03

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive

Windows XP Professional

DirectX 9.0b

Benchmarks

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: The ForceWare drivers weigh in at just 8.5MB.

NASCAR Racing 2003 Season

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Nascar 2003: OpenGL (for NV cards)

SIDEBAR: Now that the racing season is over and Papy’s contract with NASCAR has ended, we’ll probably have to move over to NASCAR Heat once the latest version is released.

IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles

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IL-2 Sturmovik: FB: OpenGL

SIDEBAR: A patch for IL-2 was recently released, one of the notables is new flyable aircraft.

Quake III 4xAA 8xAF

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Quake III - OpenGL

SIDEBAR: It’s hard to believe Quake 3 is a 4-year old game engine.

Q3 Image Quality

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After seeing the Quake 3 performance enhancements, you’re probably wanting to see screenshots. NVIDIA’s impressive performance improvements would mean nothing if image quality is compromised after all. Up first we have ForceWare release 52.16:

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And now, ForceWare 53.03:

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Taking a closer look at NVIDIA’s 4xAA implementation, we can’t see any differences between ForceWare release 52.16 and ForceWare 53.03. Here are the images zoomed at 400%:



ForceWare 52.16


ForceWare 53.03


Likewise, we zoomed in on the 8xAF screenshots:



ForceWare 52.16


ForceWare 53.03







SIDEBAR: DOOM turned 10 earlier this month.

Unreal Tournament 2003 4xAA

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Unreal Tournament 2003 – Direct3D

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

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Unreal Tournament 2003

SIDEBAR: UT 2003 must have recently hit the bargain bins, I saw a copy for $10!

Splinter Cell

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Splinter Cell – Direct3D

SIDEBAR: 2003 will probably go down as the year of the game bundle. We’ve seen a lot of good graphics cards coming with killer game bundles, starting with MSI’s NBOX.

Tomb Raider

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Tomb Raider – Direct3D

SIDEBAR: The GeForce FX 5200 cards don’t support depth-of-field which is why they were excluded.

Halo	Page:: ( 11 / 13 )

Halo – Direct3D

Notes

SIDEBAR: EB is currently offering free shipping on Halo 2, I’ve been tempted to pre-order my copy.

Halo (cont’d)

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Notes

Notes

SIDEBAR: Keep in mind that we’re running canned demos that came with the game.

Conclusion

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DirectX 7 owners:

If you’re reading this article and you’re still using a DX7 era card as your primary display adapter for your system, you really, really need to upgrade. Whether you were one of the first to pick up the GeForce2 Ultra, found a GeForce2 MX at a price that was just too hard to resist, or you’re relying on an integrated display such as the nForce/nForce2 IGP there really is no excuse not to upgrade. DX8 cards like the RADEON 8500/9000/9100/9200 can easily be found for under $80 online, as well as the GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB.

NVIDIA also offers the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra for under $120 and if you have just a little bit more to spend RADEON 9600 XT’s can be found in the $150-$160 range, while GeForce FX 5900’s like the eVGA card we just reviewed can be found for as little as $185 (with Call of Duty for a limited time only). If you didn’t put one of these cards on your Christmas list, certainly you can use some of the money you might have picked up over the holidays for a graphics upgrade. This is doubly important if you’re got a speedy CPU.

In any case, NVIDIA’s latest ForceWare driver doesn’t offer much over 52.16. The compatibility issues that have been resolved may make it worth the upgrade, as we haven’t found any huge gotchas that have been introduced with 53.03.

DirectX 8 card owners

Like the GeForce2 class cards (and GeForce4 MX), there’s really nothing noteworthy for GeForce3/GeForce4 card owners in ForceWare 53.03. You won’t find any huge performance increases, and other than a few compatibility issues that have been fixed, ForceWare 53.03 is a pretty mild upgrade.

Therefore, if the new features introduced in Detonator 50 weren’t a huge deal for you, you probably won’t find much to like in ForceWare 53.03. Detonator 40 was probably the last big driver release for your class of graphics card. Detonator 45 or 43 should suffice just fine, depending on your which upgrade was your last.

DirectX 9 card owners

If you own a GeForce FX class card, ForceWare 53.03 is certainly a worthy upgrade, more so than ForceWare 52.16 in fact, due to its greater compatibility and enhanced OpenGL performance. ForceWare 52.16 really focused on improving performance in DX9 applications.

Of course, keep in mind that the largest increases we saw were for GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, the less expensive GeForce FX cards didn’t quite see the same gains, but they were still improvements nonetheless. Therefore, with the growing popularity of Call of Duty, ForceWare 53.03 comes just in time for GeForce FX owners. We saw the improvements firsthand in the eVGA review.

If you’re not a heavy follower of the Quake 3 engine games and just don’t find yourself using many OpenGL titles in general, ForceWare 53.03 probably won’t come as a huge improvement to you. Many of the issues found in 52.16 still exist, while the DirectX applications we tested performed largely the same overall. Hopefully NVIDIA will have some real substantial reasons for you to upgrade your driver in 2004!



SIDEBAR: What do you think of ForceWare release 53.03? Have you downloaded it already? Share your experiences in the news comments!