Miracle Drivers?

As we are fortunate with this NVIDIA Beta release to be able to share the relevant information a bit early prior to the public launch (thanks in part to NVIDIA/EVGA as well as the CeBIT launch), we have a few more details to share this afternoon. While we are holding back on delivering our official driver briefing until the official driver launch, we ran a few tests this morning with the 1.0-8751 package and then again with the current 1.0-8178 drivers. The hardware setup remained the same for both of these driver tests and the graphics card used was a normal GeForce 6600GT with 128MB of video memory. The Linux distribution was Fedora Core 4 with the 2.6.15 kernel. Providing a very rough comparison between these two driver releases was RTCW: Enemy Territory v2.60 with the Railgun time-demo that we have been using for years. For this news posting, we simply used the high-quality visual settings with the in-game configuration. We also refrained from using any AA/AF visuals. The resolutions tested were simply 640 x 480 and 1280 x 1024. Using the 1.0-8178 drivers the average frame-rate was 107.8 and 106.1 FPS, respectively. Using the private 1.0-8751 drivers, the results were 108.2 and 105.1 FPS. Interesting, eh? As a very preliminary generalization, the performance aspect of these drivers do not appear to be a miracle frame-rate wise; however, the results right here are simply from a single Linux-native program. Additional tests will come with our official briefing upon the official driver launch. On a side note, the memory issues that have been repeatedly reported since the Rel80 drivers (the ones in which NVIDIA had originally denounced) appear to have been addressed. The investigation still continues...