nYdGeo

The information I am providing here may apply to both NVidia & ATI users, but I can only report as a NVidia user. This is also not a new topic to some, yet I am always suprised to learn how many fellow PC enthusiasts are not aware of this. Also, please note that this has nothing to do with the great folks here at NGO, nor anyone else producing custom drivers.

To begin, please understand the 'newer' NVidia graphics card drivers does NOT mean 'better' performance or 'better' anything else for many users or their cards. In my case I am using two EVGA 7900GT KO cards in an Athlon X2, Windows XP SP2 environment. I tested with standard NVidia drivers and NGO custom NVidia drivers. With the standard drivers I am usually able to clock the cards at 620/1790MHz, and with the NGO drivers I clock them at 605/1700Mhz. (It is of note here that using the NGO drivers at these speeds I see higher benchmark scores than I do with the standard drivers at any speed!)

I tested with Standard NVidia driver versions 93.71, 91.47, 91.31, 84.21, 81.98, and 81.94. I ran the same tests on the 2 7800GT Superclock cards in my wife's PC. The very best overall performance was clearly achieved using the 91.47, and this was not by a small margin either.

I then repeated the same testing using the NGO custom drivers, and achieved the same results. Using the NGO drivers, I noticed that the image quality is better; sometimes the improvement is subtle, other times it is obvious and immediately noticable.

This tells us several things. First, the work of the folks at NGO is wonderful. Their drivers are stable, offer all of the configuration that I need, and provide me with the best image quality. It also tells us that if you give the folks at NGO a driver that offers inferior performance on 7900GT cards, after the tweak the driver it will still offer inferior performance, though with better image quality, etc.

The most important thing for enthusiasts to note is therefore this: at some point or another, NVidia's video card drivers are pretty much optimal for a given series of cards/GPUs. When NVidia is focused on fine-tuning their drivers for optimal performance of the 7800/7900 series of video cards, know that this may possibly or even likely come at the expense to performance of 6800/6600 series cards!

As soon as when NVidia started optimizing their drivers for their 7950 cards, the performance of 7900GT cards using those drivers began to diminish. I recently spoke with two fellow enthusiasts, one with two cards identical to mine, and another with one. I asked them to each test the same drivers, with of them using drivers from NVidia, and the other using drivers from NGO. They are both using NGO 91.47 drivers as a result of their own testing.

I have not yet tested the official 97.02 drivers, but I have already spoken to a friend with 2 7900GTX cards in his PC who just tested with them last night. He is also back to the 91.47 drivers, claiming that he saw a larger decrease in performance with these drivers than he did when he tested the 93.71 version.

So, identify when you card series began, work forward from there, but expect to soon find an optimum driver version for your series card, from which you probably do not need to move from.

This now brings me to the question part of this. Is this as bad as it looks? What I see amounts to NVidia saying 'well, we have the 7950's out, we're about to release the 8800's, so screw the 7900's now; its their turn in rotation. Then a few weeks later its 'well, the 8800's are current, so add all 7-series cards to the list of cards that we no longer care about'.

These are only MY observations/opinions, but it appears to me that once NVidia has moved on to the next series of cards that they want us all to buy, they cease any efforts to improve the drivers for previous cards. More importantly, it seems that they allow or provide actual degradation in preformance for previous cards lines.

Please test for yourselves; I am confident that the end results will be as clear for you as they were for me. Switching from 91.47's to 93.71's cost me over 1000 points on 3DMark'06! Oh, and someone please ask the kind folks over at NVidia how they rationalize this to themselves (no doubt the almighty dollar supercedes all), and lastly how they sleep at night.

Thank you for your time.

IModIntel

Well, (nice long post BTW) me having an Nvidia Card on my secondary system, i have to agree: the latest drivers are never the best. I use the NGO Optimized drivers on both my machines because they give me the best results. Unlike Nvidia though, I always found that the newer the Official Catalyst drivers were, the better they were also.

Nvidia SHOULD take more attention to the performance of their older products.

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Regeneration

Maybe Nvidia and ATI are using their drivers for marketing purposes. Reducing the performance of the old products to get more sales. We need to check it out sometime.

nYdGeo

Also, I apologize if I put this in the wrong place. I failed to see the "NVidia Discussion" section were this more than likely belongs. If an admin would not mind, please move it where it will be appropriate. Thank you!

Unixlord

In the case of Linux drivers Nvidia silently stops supporting older cards. ATI tries to improve peformance of all cards with every release. Intel has opensource drivers only because their graphics suck.

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IQ, when aggregated, follows Ohm's law.

Mac Daddy

Nice post nYdGeo

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"People who live in glass houses shouldn't cast stones"

nCaine

Nice post nYdGeo , and good to see some one is diging in it . But i wanna add one factor more.

Well as you see on the left , im running 6600 GT , and long time user of NGO also , both for Ati & nVidia.

Well i dont do any benchmarks , dont like them and im not into numbers , its boring. When i check a new driver , i have fee games old , and relative new , whit i tested with many diffrent official , betas , other modded , and NGO. Since i know these games very well , and always check them at exaclty the same settings , i see the difference in performance and quality. OR if i cant see any , ther is reale no difference.

And i think that image quality is getting better (its nothing huge , rather small steps) , with almos every good oficial driver, and then modded by NGO . And im into IQ more that pure FPS so this is why i use latest NGO sets , when they come out.

Cheers

PS. I just found out that my mobo only one slot supoort ddr 400 , dumb me , hehe my network admin gonna give me 1g kingstone stick , for my 3 x 256 , for free.

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-----------------And if someone gave you a pile of gold, you'd probably complain that it was too heavy-------------------

nYdGeo

I agree more or less about benchmarks. I've never had the desire to go for records or whatever, and run benchmarks on my PC as is; no killing every un-needed app and service to get that extra point. I use them for their most basic functionality: a baseline for this machine. As long as nothing else changes except (as an example) video card drivers during a given session of testing, I can use the results to interpret the basic performance of the drivers. That's all.

Like you, I am into the best image quality at the best performance that I can get in a normal operational environment. I could get much higher benchmark scores by tweaking the snot out of the factory NVidia drivers, but it just looks bad. The folks here at NGO are all about the image quality, as you already know, but the best part for me is that they are giving us the image quality along with top-flight performance. That rules!

But, if a particular NVidia driver is coded in such a manner that the performance is lower when compared to another driver version, there is little that even the NGO folks can do. That is my complaint, and not to NGO. NVidia should never, I repeat never release a driver that verifiably reduces the performance of any model video card based on an NVidia GPU, etc. They do this anyway, which is most disappointing.

In retrospect, I never lost any performance to new drivers when I was using ATI cards & drivers that didn't come back the next version. As in, every now and again they might release a driver that (as an example) ran the cards hot, and reduced performance; but they realized their mistake and fixed it in the next release. I sure hope that NVidia realizes the insanity of the situation and either fixes it or explains why they need to release drivers that lower the performance of their products.

Thanks to all for your comments, information and thoughts.

lumo

well i use the latest beta drivers as with those drivers i do not get any yellow texture or triangle bug
at least better than triangles and higher fps, but this might vary from model to model.

PS: i got an 8x00 card... (had an x800 before - lol you see switching from ati to nvidia does only xchange two chars )