Detonator Battle! 5.45 vs 6.18 vs 6.35 (PART 1)
Oct 18th, 2000 | By Archive
Detonator Battle! 5.45 vs 6.18 vs 6.35 (PART 1)
Date
: 10/18/00 – 05:06:43 PM
Author
:
Category
: Drivers
Introduction :
As the search for the perfect Nvidia videocard driver continues, we keep struggling with those beta detonator drivers. An hour ago I received the newest Nvidia det. pack, 6.35, for Win9x from my good friend @ Zoiah HQ.
As soon as I got them, I did some 3DMark2000 tests. Here was the test system in question.
TEST SYSTEM :
CPU : Intel PIII-980 (FSB:7x140Mhz)
Mainboard : Asus CUV4X 1006 bios
Chipset : VIA 694X Chipset (4in1 4.25a driver)
Video : Creative Annihilator PRO DDR 32MB @ 140/340
Memory : 128MB PC133 (2-3-3)
Harddisk : IBM 20GB UDMA66 @ 7200RPM
OS : Win ME
Benchmarks :
Because I received the 6.35′s only an hour ago, I haven’t had much time to do any real benchmarking, like running Quake 3: Arena timedemos, or Unreal Tournament benches. I promise you, these other tests will be in the second part (PART 2) of this ‘Detonator Battle’. Here I will also comment more thoroughly on the results I got from the benchmark results I did earlier today.
I did the 3DMark2000 benchmark on my Geforce DDR overclocked to 140/340. Also, an important issue is I’m using DirectX 8 Build 183. I noticed in benchmarks I did before that this version of DirectX really slows down overall 3D performance on my Windows Me setup. In reality, this changes nothing about this driver comparison. I can still compare the relative performance of one driver against the other. Let’s take a peek at the results :
Conclusion :
Looks like the (new detonator 2) 5.45 driver can’t catch up with his younger brothersm, the detonator 3 drivers. In comparison with the older 6.18 or 6.34 sets, we see little or no performance gain when using the newest 6.35 drivers. Nevertheless, this driver provides great stability on my system using AGP4X. When using the 6.34 drivers, I frequently got those most enjoyable bluescreens using AGP4X; with the 6.35 drivers, those days are over now! What a shame…
A full driver comparison will be online very soon …
Note by Adam: You can catch my similar driver comparison article here.