New nVidia drivers & NWN

Manuel the White · Post by **Manuel the White** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 6:55 pm

This from the Vault:

New & Faster NVIDIA Drivers
NVIDIA has released new ForceWare drivers (Release 55) for their GeForce brand of graphics cards. According to the release it "includes many new features, tools and enhancements, including customised application and game profile settings, and support for PCI Express." Most interestingly they claim GPU performance increases of 48% specifically in NWN.

Here's the excerpt:
Thanks to the NVIDIA unified driver architecture (UDA), NVIDIA ForceWare Release 55 delivers a free performance upgrade for NVIDIA GPUs, both past and present. With the new driver, GeForce(TM) FX 5900XT GPU performance in F1 Challenge '99-'02 can increase as much as 120(i) per cent. In Gunmetal, GeForce FX 5200 GPU performance increases up to 22(ii) per cent and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra GPU performance in Neverwinter Nights goes up as much as 48(iii) per cent faster.

Lafferty · Post by **Lafferty** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 7:06 pm

Is the performance gain for nwn the same on other gpus from nvidia? (GForce 4Ti)

Emprod · Post by **Emprod** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 7:08 pm

I'll try on my Ti300 tonight and report as well.

FunkOdyssey · Post by **FunkOdyssey** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 7:16 pm

Any gain on a geforce2? lol... i could definitely use some

Jordicus · Post by **Jordicus** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 7:23 pm

FunkOdyssey wrote:Any gain on a geforce2? lol... i could definitely use some

i know that feeling..

Brock Fanning · Post by **Brock Fanning** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 8:32 pm

Cool! Manuel the White, with your recent posting of that State clip, and now this bit of good news, you've become my new favorite person!!

Brock

P.S. My last favorite person was the grandmother from Golden Girls...

Uvatha · Post by **Uvatha** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 8:37 pm

Manuel the White wrote:... and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra GPU performance in Neverwinter Nights goes up as much as 48(iii) per cent faster.

Seems is only for new cards, not old ones.

Lafferty · Post by **Lafferty** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 8:44 pm

Manuel the White wrote:This from the Vault:
NVIDIA ForceWare Release 55 delivers a free performance upgrade for NVIDIA GPUs, both past and present.

I asked because i assume the 48% statement is verified for that perticular gpu simply because maximus of nwvault tested it. i suppose.

Manuel the White · Post by **Manuel the White** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 11:10 pm

Brock Fanning wrote: P.S. My last favorite person was the grandmother from Golden Girls...

She was pretty hot. I guess we found the one person who voted for Harpy in the favorite HotU creature poll.

Vroshgrak · Post by **Vroshgrak** » Tue Mar 16, 2004 11:22 pm

but you dont link us to the new drivers? your a bad bad man manuel!

Fuzz · Post by **Fuzz** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 12:15 am

People actually own the new nVidia cards?

... why?

Themicles · Post by **Themicles** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 1:12 am

Fuzz wrote:People actually own the new nVidia cards?

... why?

Because it only cost me $50 for my 5900 XT. (long story)
And IT WORKS.
Not a single bug in any game I play, unlike my stepfather's ATI cards.

-Themicles

Cougar · Post by **Cougar** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 3:44 am

Fuzz wrote:People actually own the new nVidia cards?

... why?

Like Them I got my FX 5600 w/256MB RAM for dirt cheap and the fact I NEVER have any driver issues like I've had in the past with previous ATI cards.

*runs out to see if his system works on the upgrade as they say*

FunkOdyssey · Post by **FunkOdyssey** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 3:52 am

?Forceware Release 55 delivers awesome new features which are only available on NVIDIA GPUs,? said Dan Vivoli, executive vice president of marketing at NVIDIA. ?Along with these new features, every customer using an NVIDIA-based graphics card manufactured in the last six years?all the way back to the NVIDIA TNT??will get another free performance upgrade simply by installing this software.?

w00t!

meat popsicle · Post by **meat popsicle** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 5:10 am

Seems to help my Nvidia Quadro card.

Kreetogg · Post by **Kreetogg** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 5:41 am

What I'd like to know is how bad they screwed up originaly to get that much extra performance out of thier hardware. If they are doing this now, why not when the card was released?

I can think of only two things: 1) Allows the card to work beyond original factory approved conditions (like overclocking, but not quite as bad) or 2) Pushes some of the GPU work back to the CPU, which souldn't be a big deal unless your system gets taxed easily like mine does.

Themicles · Post by **Themicles** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 7:33 am

Kreetogg wrote:What I'd like to know is how bad they screwed up originaly to get that much extra performance out of thier hardware. If they are doing this now, why not when the card was released?

I can think of only two things: 1) Allows the card to work beyond original factory approved conditions (like overclocking, but not quite as bad) or 2) Pushes some of the GPU work back to the CPU, which souldn't be a big deal unless your system gets taxed easily like mine does.

Its not an issue of screw ups.
Its an issue of optimization.
I mean, think about it. Their driver architecture is damn near universal.
Inherently, that wont be 100% optimized. Software advances over time.
Would you call the first version of Linux a screw-up just because today's versions are better?

When AGP 8x first came out, it was known that most video cards didn't use the interface to its full ability. Perhaps the optimizations are related to that?

Or, perhaps they learned something when working on the PCI-X standards? nVidia is one of the many companies involved in that.

No one company has infinit knowledge. When new knowledge is gained, there are bound to be improvements.

I'm sure they could make even better improvements on performance speeds if they were willing to make a buggy release.

-Themicles

_Wake_ · Post by **_Wake_** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 7:44 am

Updated my NVIDIA GeForce64MB MX/MX 400 with this and everything seem's to be doing fine

I when I zoom'd in my PC even had nipples

Kreetogg · Post by **Kreetogg** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 8:02 am

Themicles wrote: Its not an issue of screw ups.
Its an issue of optimization.
I mean, think about it. Their driver architecture is damn near universal.
Inherently, that wont be 100% optimized. Software advances over time.

Optimizations would certinaly be part of it. I could see how one would get a few percent increace in performance but not those numbers.

If they used a one-size-fits-all type of driver archetecture that was previously preventing them from leveraging the full power of thier GPU, "screw up" wouldn't be fitting words but lazy, cheap, etc... certinaly would be.

One could paralell this situation to that of your average car. Most cars can be tweaked (adjusting timing and values from the on-board computer, mostly) to get a few extra HP out of the engines. This is without adding or replacing hardware. The performance gain is in the neiborhood of 4-6% or so from what I've seen. But something like 22%-120% (which could be something like 20-300 horse power) is unheard of.

If there really is that much room for impovement they did pretty much screw up in the begining. They didn't botch anything, but they certinaly did fail from main points of view.

Then one also has to consider the pratices of NVIDIA (and even ATI, too) in the past. Both vendors (NVIDIA more than ATI, if I can remember) included special code in thier drivers that would artificially increace critical stats. They did this by dropping quality. The numbers looked good, but the rendered scenes did not.

Themicles · Post by **Themicles** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 8:10 am

My rendered scenes, in benchmarks and games, looked great before, and great now.

You really need to read their data though.
Many of the increases are NOT OVERALL.
They are primarily game specific.
I got a good boost in performance with my 5900 XT on America's Army (Unreal Tournament 2003 engine), but almost NO increase in performance with NWN.

The "once size fits all" as you make it sound, is not about laziness.
Its about supporting all cards from a certain point on. This is for user convenience, but also... Do you see any other company actively updating drivers for cards as old as the TNT2? The unified architecture allows such.

Why do people have to take something like this and continually bash a company?
Do you think BioWare is a shithole too?... when they've done more than just about any other gaming studio to date.

I see mindless bashing of companies that work hard.
If you're an ATI fanboy, trying to bash nVidia, then take it to the ATI forums on any number of hardware sites.

People have preferences.
I admit, ATI's cards are fast. But they also tend to be buggy from game to game.
I buy nVidia, because I have yet to ever install an nVidia driver that caused problems in any game I play.
And I play a lot.
Out of 160 total gigs of storage on my computer, 120 gigs of that is games.

Am I an nVidia fanboy? No. I'm just sick of people bashing companies or brands.
I'll be the first one to buy a powerful ATI card, when they get their drivers consistently straight.

-Themicles

Post by **tindertwiggy** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 8:12 am

arg

I get a lot of "no signal to monitor" screens now when I try to play.

That and when it does work I can't alt tab w/o getting a no signal screen... Trying to pin the fucker down. Sure is frustrating.

Oh, 5700, 128 meg.

Themicles · Post by **Themicles** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 8:14 am

My monitor does that with any video card.
It does it whenever theres a resolution change, and then kicks back in.

Check your refresh rate overrides, and set them all to default.
It might be trying to use a refresh rate that your monitor doesn't support.

-Themicles

Kreetogg · Post by **Kreetogg** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 8:29 am

I completely understand the over all thing. Some games rely on graphics cards more than others. NWN has a whole lot of graphics features that rely almost exclusively on the host system and not the graphics card to implement.

One size fits all IS lazyness, or cheapness, or one of several other things. NVIDIA COULD maintain independant drivers for a lot of thier cards and users would probably benifit much from an approach like that. How is it user convenience? Unless users keep swapping out one line of NVIDIA cards for another, recycling the same driver, I don't see any convenience.

First, I don't think NVIDIA is a shithole, so I can't "think BioWare is a shithole too". Bioware has neglected to do some things they really should have done, but that is a different discussion.

You misunderstand my intentions in this thread. I'm no ATi fanboy, and I have nothing against NVIDIA either. I was not suggesting anyone use one product over another. However I am a programmer. When I see really stupid programming issues, or what I suspect to be really stupid programming issues, I comment and discuss. That is the point of discussion boards, is it not?

Would you want a 42 inch 16:9 HDTV in your house that could only display a 24 inch diagonal image at an aspect ratio of 4:3?

Post by **tindertwiggy** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 8:30 am

Themi I am on, icq me.

Dirk Cutlass · Post by **Dirk Cutlass** » Wed Mar 17, 2004 10:10 am

Well I tried it - no detectable effect on my old GeForce video card. I guess if I was clever (and less impatient) I should have checked the fps before and then after to see if it made any improvement! Maybe I'll wind-back to the old version and try it out.

Even if there is no improvement I always like to keep drivers up to date, just in case they've fixed any bugs or something.

The World of Avlis

New nVidia drivers & NWN

New nVidia drivers & NWN

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Re: New nVidia drivers & NWN