How Do They Do It?

[JasonSix78]

I just downloaded the latest Nvidia drivers off of guru3d's website. The driver's description stated that Nvidia improved something in the package to make the Crysis SP Demo perform better and it does a good job of doing it. Before I had a mix of medium and high settings to tweak it just right. Now I can run everything on high without a snag.

My question is, how do they optimize a driver to make a specific game work well? Is it possible to modify a driver package yourself and make any game run better?


Here's the driver if anyone is interested. version 169.04
Vista 32-Bit
Vista 64-Bit
XP 32-Bit
XP 64-Bit

 

[Fallen Kell]

They play the game thru an internal debug driver which logs the function calls and operations that the card is performing. Then they look at the log file and find things that can be done more efficiently (i.e. re-order a set of operations or change them to use something else which the specific card(s) do faster). This happens all the time in programming, for instance it is faster in Perl to use a hash table than an array, they are similar data objects, where in theory the array is a simpler object and should then run faster, the fact remains that Perl can interpret, create and process hash tables faster than arrays, so, the change would be that whenever the code tells the system to make and array, the driver would say make a hash. That should give you the idea of what they do.

 

[Dkcode]

Nice information Kell.

So does the beta driver really do a great deal for performance then? Is anyone here tried the driver and experience no change?

 

[Cutthroat]

I'm using the 169.04 driver as well, with a mix of high and medium settings it's quite playable. I still have to do some tweaking, some is some good info on how to improve performance in this thread. With previous drivers it was unplayable with similar settings.

That's good info Kell, thanks. I always wondered about that myself.

 

[JasonSix78]

Awesome info Fallen! Thanks for taking the time to chime in. One more question, does an app exist that would let me play around with a video driver? I notice on guru3d there are some that people have modified from the original Nvidia packages.

 

[JasonSix78]

Originally posted by: Dkcode
Nice information Kell.

So does the beta driver really do a great deal for performance then? Is anyone here tried the driver and experience no change?

Like I said in my OP, I've personally seen an improvement with Crysis. I'm still not able to use any level of anti aliasing though.

Edit: I'll add my system specs just in case anyone wants to know.
X2 6000+, 2x1GB DDR2 @ 4-4-4-12, EVGA 8800 GTS 320MB, XP Pro 32-Bit.

 

[Dkcode]

Thanks. I'll get it check out at some point and post back.