Det 31.40 Released

[Rand]

Linky

For those of us that werent terribly impressed with the Det40's.... most of us from what I've seen.
nVidia's got some leaked 31.40 Det's, to tide us over until they get some decent Det40's.

 

[BFG10K]

How are they?

 

[WyteWatt]

Do they increase frame rates any in any games like unreal 2003, GTA3, Quake 3 arena, No one lives forever 2, Serious Sam 2, etc? Or only 1 to 2 fps more or less again?

 

[Rand]

First time entering 3D after installing the drivers I got BSOD pointing to nv4_disp.... nVidia drivers.
I havent encountered that again though so I'm hoping it was an aberration, but it worries me.

Relative to 28.41's....

All apps only tested briefly-
UT2003 Demo scripts: Minimum FPS have improved about 3-4FPS across the board, average and peak FPS havent changed.
Quake3 Timedemo: Unchanged.
3DM2001: 300 points lower... ie. well within the margin of error.
3DM2000: 451 points higher- again well within the margin of error.
Madden 2003: No real difference
High Heat Baseball 2003: Very slight drop in performance, rapid flickering for about 2seconds when panning stadium at the beginning of a game.
NHL2003 Demo: No real difference.
Thief 2: Performance dropped about 10FPS- still easily playable at 1280x1024 w/4XFSAA though, so it matters little.
Civilization 3: No differences at all.
Baldurs Gate II: No differences.
Morrowind: Slight performance drop, visuals look marginally better though.
Freedom Force: FPS seemed to fluctuate to a greater degree then I'm accustomed, the highs were higher- the lows were lower. Still perfectly playable however.

2D: No noticeable stability problems, visuals are mostly unchanged. Default 2D gamma seems to be slightly modified across the RGB spectrum, blues seem to be less crisp somehow.... tinkering with the color adjustments fixed that though. Differences were very slight though- really only noticeable when doing close editing in PhotoShop/Corel/Illustrator.
2D performance still seems about 30% lower then it was prior to late Det27.XX, unnoticeable outside of benchmarks though.

I'll keep them on for now... see if I encounter any more stability issues, and see if I can resolve the issues in HH2003.

 

[Rand]

Just noticed something else- when attemping to run Madden 2003 or NHL 2003 Demo in 16bit color the drivers seem to force all rendering settings to maximum performance, and disable everything that boosts visual quality. Changing settings in the registry or via the display properties has absolutely no effect- user input settings are ignored.
The end result being of course that visual quality under 16bpp in the above apps is absolutely TERRIBLE.

I'd be interested in knowing if others encounter anything similar with the above apps or any others.