Best Drivers

[Blinkme323]

I have an Athlon 1800 pc with a GF4 4600TI. I play mainly HL2 +mods, and Doom 3. Which drivers do you recommend? I am thinking either XG 71.84 or 44.03. The old ones benchmark well and are optimized for my card, but the new ones are better with newer games. Any suggetions?

 

[2Xtreme21]

XG 71.84. I'm not sure how well they'd play on the 4600 though.

 

[Blinkme323]

I heard they have a lot of bugs though and aren't too great for older cards. I just did a search on Guru3d and saw that the 71.25 are pretty good. Do they have a temp bug?

 

[rogue1979]

44.03 are by far the fastest.

I haven't run into any newer game issues yet, if you haven't then no reason to use a newer slower driver.

 

[happy medium]

I use the 69.73's with my TI4400 no problems at all. Most newer drivers are for new cards I believe.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Assuming that an older model video card might, indeed, run slower with new drivers because of some added overhead for software that it won't use anyway, where would such older drivers be easily located? The other side of that coin is to ask where to look up lists of the most efficient drivers for a particular series of GPU's? For instance, a GF3 Ti 500? And an FX 5900? Those are two of the three that are in use here on three different systems (the third being a Ti 4200), and I believe that the FX 5900-equipped system is running some fairly recent drivers in the 6X.XX sequence now. (And I also am in the process of assembling another, newer, system for a youngster, intending to use a 9700 Pro Radeon in it.)

?)

 

[Blinkme323]

I haven't received the card yet so I am just wondering. I will probably try the latest XG's and the old 44.03. You can find all these drivers and a lot more at guru3d.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Originally posted by: Blinkme323
I haven't received the card yet so I am just wondering. I will probably try the latest XG's and the old 44.03. You can find all these drivers and a lot more at guru3d.

If there was any article that listed the particular suitability of any one set of drivers for any one particular family of Graphics Processing Units, I didn't see it.

 

[Gstanfor]

I have a friend who still has a GF4 4200. Installed the XG75.90a drivers on his machine and they work brilliantly. Leave older drivers for dead.

The XG drivers have a "reborn" installation mode tailored for "GF4/3/below.

I'm sure the XG 71.84's would be just as good also.

Download link

 

[RelaxTheMind]

linkage (to older detonator drivers and etc)

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?id=10

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Originally posted by: Gstanfor
I have a friend who still has a GF4 4200. Installed the XG75.90a drivers on his machine and they work brilliantly. Leave older drivers for dead.

The XG drivers have a "reborn" installation mode tailored for "GF4/3/below.

I'm sure the XG 71.84's would be just as good also.

Download link

On my 56K dial-up, the 71.84 from there was shown by Mozilla's Download Manager as an hour's worth. Glad I started it so early in the day (I'm writing the reply offline to give the download the full bandwidth available, such as it is).

The XG Driver set will be fine for the Game Playing newer PC with the FX 5900 in it; I overlooked the Win9x/Me set on that site in the 7x.xx range, I hadn't seen it while getting the download I went to first. The two older PC's, including this one I do my Internet and my eMail with, have dual boots with Win98se as the default. I've been getting along with older, non-modded, drivers there and had just never really thought about whether any of them offered an advantage in NOT upgrading until now. I kinda wish I'd read both replies first, now. I'm actually "in" Win98 more frequently and for a longer total time than in W2K; so the second set of XG 71.84's might've been of greater immediate use!

(I've made a bookmark in Mozilla; I'll return at another non-peak hour for the second set later.)

The OC thing has never been my approach; but I also had not built a PC at home between 1998 or so and a year ago. The one I now use for a file server and file back up machine on my LAN, was originally a White Box PC from a local outfit. The other two I use quite a bit are both 2004 models off of my own spare room's assembly table. Instead of being OC'd, I just bought an XP 2800 and an XP 3000 and run them at stock speeds (though I had trouble getting an ABit MB to do the 200/400 with the 3000, and swapped to an Asus).

On the same sort of "not OC'd" computer operations descriptive line, the reference to a PC on hand for "Gaming" actually means it may be used to do some flight sim play and some RPG (I have KOTOR on it), but not Doom3 or HL2. FPS isn't my thing, even though the (eBay) seller of the FX 5900 threw in a copy of Doom3.

 

[Gstanfor]

Kiwi,

I have a 5900XT currently (about to purchase a 6800GT though - primarily because I want 256mb of video ram).

I'm running the 75.90a drivers on it at the moment, and I can honestly say these drivers are brilliant. As I posted above they also work very nicely on GF4 cards too.

It's not just speed that they offer, though they are speedy, they are extremely stable and render games correctly.

For instance I have an obscure racing game "Beetle Crazy Cup" - it wouldn't render correctly under 71.20 and several other recent drivers. It does under 75.90a. So do ancient games like ViperRacing. Mafia has been prone to randomly crashing on me under recent drivers and having z buffer issues, with 75.90a it is rock stable and no rendering issues.

These are just a few examples I could list off the top of my head. An excellent driver set IMO. The only thing 71.84 really fixes over these is the half-life water and CS grass. Since I don't take much interest in either title I'm not to worried about that at the moment.