Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: humble on May 04, 2006, 10:09:01 PM
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I've been struggling with connectivity issues and went thru about 15 drivers for my 7900GT (was really a minor part of a bigger problem)...
anyway I stumbled across the DHzer0point drivers. I have never seen a set of aftermarket drivers make this big a differance 50% F/R increase over the omegas for example. Obviously if your happy with waht you have then leave it alone....but if your looking for some more pop I'd suggest giving these a try....Driver (http://www.driverheaven.net/~dhzer0point/)
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Thanks for the link; I'm always looking for 3rd party drivers to try on for size. I have been using the 84.56 drivers without any problems on my 7900GTX & my 7800GT, the previous drivers were crap but this one is solid. I would like to know if the frame rates are stable with this driver heaven one? I used Omega drivers & my frame rates got really erratic with a 6800 card I have.
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so far they are rock solid....best drivers I've ever used....
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I've generally always found their drivers to be at least as good as the Omega ones, although sometimes more buggy. They are more willing to do the "beta" thing than Omega is, but its not always a bad thing. I'll give this one a try with my 6800 as well and see if there is any performance increase.
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Star if any perf increase is noticed, do you think it would transfer to all 6xxx cards?
Bronk
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Dunno. It would depend on what their "optimizations" take advantage of. More than likely they are specific to the 7xxx series GPUs, I still dont think any of Nvidia's drivers have taken full advantage of those cards. Same with ATI and the new x1000 series cards. They need alot of tweaking yet on the drivers to really make those cards hum.
I'm still going to try it though. :)
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I dont know that they are specific to the 7xxx series but I know that alot of the aftermarket drivers (like the latest omega's) dont support the 7900. What suprised me was the combination of detail and speed. I always run 3DAquamark when I swap drivers to make sure everything "took" and not only where they noticably faster....but detail level was much better (which I didnt think was possible). In AH I've flown 3 or 4 hops and FR is thru the roof and detail is well beyond what I thought game was capable of (1024 tex, sliders full left across the board)......
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I tried the ones from driver heaven; I took a 20 - 30 FPS hit ( I dropped down to 71FPS at one point ) in a GV in ground view in an open field by myself. Using the EVGA 84.56 drivers I only drop down that far in heavy trees & bushes with a lot of other players around with fires & smoke.
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wow, obviously very system dependent then. Iv'e got an XFX 7900GT...seems to like these alot....
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Omega tends to lag behind a bit on the Nvidia drivers. I'm not sure why, if they are more difficult or what. Thats always been the case. However, when he does put one out it's usually worth the wait.
Driver Heaven puts out their Zeropoint drivers far more frequently, but they rely on gamers to point out bugs for them to fix too. Optimizations are usually similar to the Omega ones. Its just a tradeoff. With one you have to wait forever for updated drivers, but know they will almost be guaranteed to be stable and work right; with the other you get more frequent updates but have to deal with more bugs along the development path.
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Originally posted by humble
wow, obviously very system dependent then. Iv'e got an XFX 7900GT...seems to like these alot....
Yeah they must be; I'm running an EVGA 7900GTX. You should try the 84.56 drivers from EVGA & see how they perform. I'm just curious is all, I play around with my drivers more than most people probably do so I don't think anything about changing them back & forth on a whim.
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sure......
I'll benchmark this one then swap em out and run another benchmark as well as look at them in AH.....
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looks like the evga are the actual Nvidia forceware not "aftermarket" drivers....downloading from evga site...8456XP2K.exe
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I think EVGA helped develop those drivers...I know they were available on the EVGA site before they were on the NVIDIA site. I only D/L'd the ones from EVGA but I'm sure their identical to the ones on NVIDIA's download page. I'll be interested to see how they look side by side with the ones from driver heaven.
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Last time I looked the Omega nVidia drivers hadn't been updated in a long, long time. Last ones were based on official nVidia 66.93's, nVidias latest are 84.21!!! (betas are 84.43).
So for 6600 series nVidia cards and upwards they are pretty worthless.
Even more worthless for 7800's of any kind, 7800's and up need 80 series drivers.
So for the later model nVidia cards look elsewhere, for ATI he still keeps them up to date.
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Using the latest Nvidia drivers tested against the Zeropoint drivers for the Geforce 6800U
No difference in fps in most cases. In the full throttle all optimizations off and all the eye candy on test, the Zeropoint drivers held a slight advantage in keeping the fps up during the worst drops in AH (tested offline).
Basically my test consisted of noting fps first in the tower, on the runway, in the air with all planes visible, in the air with all planes visible and the B24 and P38 in flames, and then closeup flybys of the burning planes. I did this for each set of drivers with optimizations on, vsync on, refresh rate at 60, resolution 1280x1024. Then the same with optimizations off. I also tested both drivers with resolution at 1024x768 and refresh rate 85.
With all optimizations off, I'd get a pretty substantial drop in fps with the flames, across the board. Less so with optimizations on, but still noticeable. Most of the time otherwise, fps were pegged at max (refresh rate).
I really dont see that they offer a measureable increase in performance for 6xxx series Geforce cards over the official Nvidia version. Looks like the drivers are as refined as they will get for the older cards.
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Thanx Star I'll stick to the old omega drivers.
Bronk