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Win2K VIA AGP GART Comparison


Date
: 03/15/02 – 10:56:46 PM

Author
:

Category
: Drivers

Page 1 : Index

Thank you VIA, for giving me something to do today. I was browsing through the Shugashack earlier and saw a mention of the new AGP GART drivers just released. VIA mentioned some slight performance improvements, so I thought I'd put up a quick, dirty comparison article between a few of the past AGP drivers.

VIA
has come a LONG way from the days when I wouldn't touch their chipsets with a 5 foot pole. Thankfully those days are over, and I've had this ASUS P3V4X(133A chipset) running without a hitch for a year and a half now. There were a few quirks at first, but with frequently updated driver sets and BIOS', VIA has earned a warm place in my heart.

Their latest release is this 4.10 AGP driver, available now as a separate entity from the 4in1 drivers, and soon to be available in the next 4in1 release. Here is what is updated from the previous drivers, ripped straight from Via Hardware:

• Provides an enhanced AGP driver for Windows XP
• Fixes some information strings to pass some driver verification tools published by 3rd party companies
• Supports the AGP function in VIA P4X series North Bridge Chips
• Certified for Windows XP in the INF file

  VIA stated some minor performance benefits, and that is what I am here to discuss. I ran two benchmarks, Quake 3: Arena for the OpenGL losers, and 3DMark 2001 SE for the DirectX crowd. Quake 3 was run at two distinct setting types. For the 640x480x16 resolution, I set the quality of everything to the lowest degree, while for all the other resolution runs, the quality was set to the highest degree possible. 3DMark was run at it's default settings, at 1024x768x32. Here are my basic system specs:

• P3 550E @ 733mhz
• ASUS P3V4X 1006T BIOS(Winbond Clock Generator)
• 512MB PC133 SDRAM 3-3-3-5 @ 133mhz
• Innovision Tornado Geforce 2 MX @ 225/201
• Windows 2000 SP2 DirectX 8.1
• VIA 4.37 4in1
• NVIDIA 23.11 Detonator Drivers
• VIA 4.03, 4.04, 4.05, 4.10 AGP drivers
• Quake 3 Arena 1.31 demo four
• 3DMark 2001 SE

  Here are the Quake 3 results:

  

  As you can see, for me, there was a fairly sizable boost at resolutions of 1024x768x16 and greater. At 1280x1025x16, there is a 23% performance boost, which makes the game almost playable at that resolution. It's like I overclocked my Geforce 2 MX's SDRAM an extra 20-25mhz. I currently play the game at 800x600x32, but with this new AGP driver, I could probably up it to 1024x768x32 without too much discomfort. I'm currently spending most of my gaming time in
  Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
  , a Quake 3 engine game, which runs like a dog on my system in most levels, even at low quality video settings. Too bad there's no way to run a timedemo in that game, because I'd love to see what kind of difference these drivers make there. Hopefully, one day, EA or 2015 will get their head out of their ass and pull things together.

  Here are the 3DMark 2001 SE results.

  

  VIA claimed an extra 100 points in 3DMark with a Geforce 3 in Windows XP. Well, nothing like that happened for me. Whatever they did, it didn't effect my DirectX performance one bit in the jump from 4.05 to 4.10. Looks like there was a sizable performance increase of the 4.05 drivers over the 4.04 and lower ones though.

  In conclusion, I see no reason why you shouldn't update your AGP driver set. Sure, there's nothing wrong with any of the ones benchmarked here, but a little extra OpenGL performance never hurt anyone. So I say go for it!

  Go here for the drivers.

  By the by, if you want to see the spreadsheet I used, click here!