NVIDIA’s Detonator 3 Drivers — THG.RU

Introduction

Today the masses will rush to read about NVIDIA new flagship chipset, the GeForce2 Ultra, but that should not be the only thing everyone is interested in. Shipping along with the new powerhouse is a performance-enhanced Detonator 3 driver. NVIDIA is claiming this unified driver boosts performance across all its existing family of chipsets on the market by up to 50%. These are large claims for merely an updated driver so we’ve decided to investigate. My main goal was to see how much performance was gained by this driver (if any) over the previous one, how it was done and what else was changed with in this driver.

What’s New?

I couldn’t believe the claims NVIDIA was making so I immediately contacted the folks there and asked for details. Initially I was met with mostly marketing jargon but after a bit of probing, I had found what I wanted and then some. Unfortunately full details of what NVIDIA has done within this driver won’t be released for another week or two but until then, this is what we know.

NVIDIA said that it initially releases with a functional driver that provides a properly working product and follows up shortly after with a performance-geared driver. This is something we’ve seen in the past as early as the TNT2 to TNT2 Ultra. Apparently the extremely talented NVIDIA driver team was doing major enhancements to the driver after the launch of the GeForce2 and the product of their work is just now being released.

Performance gains were seen from optimizing the use of the system platforms (memory, caches, new CPU instructions) to resources on the video cards themselves. Most folks will probably be reporting the general marketing list of enhancements to the driver but what it comes down to was the software engineers enhancing the driver specifically for each card and having the driver allocate resources optimally for the given tasks. These optimizations will benefit the card’s performance in situations where the hardware was being pushed hardest such as high resolution and high color scenarios. Technical details on how this was all done should be released in a couple of weeks so stay tuned.

TwinView Broken?

Another interesting thing in this new driver is the fact that TwinView is now functional. Unfortunately, early on I was without a GF2 MX board with multiple video outputs to find out that TwinView wasn’t available before the Detonator 3 driver. However, during one of my conversations with a couple of the big board manufacturers, they were quick to make sure I knew that the TwinView feature wouldn’t be available on their boards until NVIDIA had it working properly in the reference drivers. I was a bit shocked until I tried one of my newer GF2 MX boards to find out that this was all true. The Detonator 3 driver did indeed fix this problem and I was able to play around with spanning mode (virtual desktop type mode) and clone mode (have the same output on both devices). I would say this is one of the most important fixes in this driver.

Driver Interface

The driver interface has had some changes in both functionality and appearance. Let’s take a peek.

This has remained basically the same. The screen provides you with general system information from the driver to the graphic board configuration.

If you have the video out capabilities, the controls will be here. This feature also remains the same.

Driver Interface

This is a newly functional part of the driver. The options here are pretty simple and a reboot is required to change the TwinView modes unfortunately.

The color controls of the driver haven’t changed.

Things appear to be the same in the D3D section so far.

Driver Interface

Things are slightly different in this window but the same functionality is present.

The same abilities are here for Anti Aliasing but the labels for the settings now exist.

The OpenGL window hasn’t changed much aside from the new AA options.

Driver Interface

There are no changes to the overlay color property window.

Although the hardware settings appear to be the same, the ability to support higher clock rates was added.

There is nothing exciting here, as things haven’t changed.

Test Setup

A quick note before we have a look at the charts. You’ll notice that the solid bars are the 6.16 drivers and the shaded bars are the older 5.32 drivers.

Test Results — Quake 3 Arena

All the cards gained performance across the board. Although we’re not in high color, amazingly enough every card picked up a few frames.

Now here is a prime example of why people should take note of the Detonator 3 release. Look at the huge gains we see here! All this for free, not bad at all.

Test Results — MDK2 Demo

The gains in MDK2 Demo aren’t as good as what we just saw in 32-bit Quake 3 but the gains are still seen across the resolutions for each board.

Now that we bumped the complexity up a bit with higher color, the gains increase dramatically. These gains are surely end-results of optimized memory usage.

Test Results — Evolva Rolling Demo Bump Mapped

Things don’t appear to be as positive for the new Detonator 3 driver in Evolva. We see small gains here and there as well as places where the driver fell behind in performance.

With 32-bit toggled on, I had expected difference results. I’m shocked to see that the gains are still small and in some places, lower than the older driver. Overall the Detonator 3 driver wins but by a slim margin.

Conclusion

NVIDIA has definitely proven that it has a seriously talented software team that was capable of producing some dramatic performance boosts from this major driver revision. The claims of up to 50% boosts in performance were not seen in my testing but the generous gains across the board are more than welcome. The performance of NVIDIA boards in their weakest areas of high resolution and color are now given some breathing room to provide a boost up to around 20% in some cases.

Aside from this release pleasing the many current and future NVIDIA customers, I must say that it isn’t looking very good for NVIDIA’s competition right now. Coupled with the new driver, the older NVIDIA solutions as well as the newer low-cost solutions will boast some respectable numbers that the competition can only beat with their flagship offerings while not offering much of a challenge to NVIDIA’s high-end equivalents.

The GeForce2 Ultra might be retailing soon for some $499 and thus be above most people’s budgets, but with the release of Detonator 3, older NVIDIA card owners will be happy to take a nice performance boost without any charge.