Imagine if Nvidia releases HSR Drivers???

[OneOfTheseDays]

I know that if Nvidia released some HSR drivers that they probably would not be as good as 3dfx's drivers, however, if they did improve performance by a decent margin they would retake the crown as speed king. Now, i am just curious as to how freakin fast the gf2ultra would be if it had some HSR drivers. That would be insane.

 

[Doomguy]

If NVidia released HSR drivers right now they would blow away 3dfx's HSR because the NV20 is going to use HSR. NVidia could most likely easily release HSR drivers for the GF2 but will most likely not because the speed difference between the GF2 and the NV20 wouldent be as big.

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

nVidia doesn't have the driver writers for these kind of drivers, IMO. They were written by some people from Gigapixel.

 

[Doomguy]

NVidia obviously does have the driver writers for it since the NV20 will have HSR. They wrote very nice T&L drivers so what would stop them from doing HSR removal drivers? NVidia has plenty of money to hire talented people.

 

[dawheat]

and the GTS has all that lovely fillrate being unused- even minimal HSR would boost performace quite a bit.

 

[Sunner]

Hafta say I think nVidia has the best driver dudes around.
Win9x drivers, Win2k/NT drivers, Linux drivers, BeOS drivers.

And the Linux drivers are about the same speed as the Win9x and Win2K drivers, a claim no other company in the biz can make.

Pretty impressive IMO.

 

[Marty]

The HSR done by 3dfx's latest drivers use an algorithm different from any used to date. Those which are already known and well documented are too inefficient, or else they would have been used a long time ago. For NVidia to write competitive HSR drivers, they would also have to implement a new algorithm, which, judging by the pace of things, is difficult to do.

Marty

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

<< NVidia obviously does have the driver writers for it since the NV20 will have HSR. >>


What does that have to do with them having good drivers? The people at Gigapixel have been working with tilers and occlusion techniques for years. nVidia's great drivers come from having experience with scanline renderers. This will be a new core for them, and thus will require drasitically different drivers.

 

[Doomguy]

So? Gigapixel didnt make the V5. They have dont have any experience with it yet they were sucessful in adding HSR removal to it.

 

[BFG10K]

I wouldn't be the least bit suprised if nVidia released some HSR drivers to jump on the bandwagon (remember FSAA), but I doubt they would ever be as good as 3dfx's.

I doubt nVidia would ever get all of the glitches out of them, just like I doubt they'll ever remove all of the glitches from the detonators and get full working WHQL drivers. It'll be just one more thing they have to work on (and fix).

nVidia's best bet is to simply design HSR drivers for the NV20 and not worry about their current chipsets.

 

[CresenS]

hey you guys , who knows if Det3 have hsr in them ?

 

[A5]

I think if anything, NVIDIA should stop their whole unified driver thing. All it does is add bloat and encourage them to make their products similar, which means not as many revolutionary ideas and products.

 

[mindiris]

Although they do have &quot;unified&quot; drivers, one would note that the Riva 128 series (NV3) isn't acually officially supported by the Detonator drivers.

I do know for a fact that NV4 boards has some level of compatibility with Riva 128 drivers however. Need for Speed 4 High Stakes was running like molasses until I removed my old drivers after seeing that my Geforce DDR was detected as a Riva 128 with EA's little diagnostic tool that came with the game.

Nvidia puts a layer of hardware abstraction (interface) between the hardware and driver layer. This is good engineering design as changing the underlying hardware does not necessarily require an entire driver rewrite. As long as the interface is designed correctly, it should hold up well enough for Nvidia to keep churning out drivers at their current phenominal rate. It's a trade off, much like parts of OpenGL and Direct3D aim to do for hardware: a consistent interface for software developers.

I suspect 3Dfx had partly had driver quaility in mind due to the significant changes needed to introduce a new hardware design. They might have simply not anticipated that the graphics board market would move so rapidly, and could have been limited by time and finances to be able to support a new design.

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

All Nvidia needs is a minor 15-20 percent boost in drivers to retake the crown. They dont need superior hsr drivers. And i'm pretty sure image quality wont be a concern because the hsr settings won't be too aggressive.