NVidia vs. GeForce4 Ti 4600: Detonator Driver Comparison

I only recently decided that the Detonator 41.09 drivers from NVidia were worth taking a look at on my system. After some initial problems with the drivers, I eventually traced down the conflict to my old audio drivers. The C-Media on-board audio chipset on my Soyo SY-K7V Dragon+ gave me more problems than they were worth. After installing a new Soundblaster Live! 5.1 card, many of the mysterios conflicts in my system went away. To make a long story short, the Detonator 41.09 do seem to be stable on my Win98 box and actually proved to be pretty fast, too.

I tested five separate versions of the NVidia Detonator drivers and ran both 3DMark2001 SE and GLExcess as my benchmarking tools. On each driver revision I ran the benchmarks at least three times apiece and took the best score. Without further ado, here are the comparison graphs for all of our scores:

3DMark2001 SE

GLExcess

These scores raise an interesting issue. In 3DMark, our Direct3D benchmark, the 40.72 drivers shined above the rest, although the 40.71's weren't far behind, with the 41.09 landing in third place. Revisions 28.32 and 30.82 of the Detonators hardly compare to the newer drivers in 3DMark.

But the story changes a little in GLExcess, where OpenGL performance becomes important. The newest Detonator 41.09's easily take the top position with 9224 points, a notable 105 points higher than the 40.72's. Also in the GLExcess tests we can see the older 30.82 revision taking second place over the newer 40.71 drivers by 45 points. The 28.32's still come in last with 8979 points.

All these numbers might appear a little more significant than they really are, though. When you take into account the relative gains between revisions the performance benefits aren't really that huge:

3DMark2001 SE

GLExcess

Only because of the poor performance of the 40.71's in GLExcess do the 40.72 and 41.09 drivers come out as the top performers. It's really a matter of necessity which revision you choose to use. The 41.09's display better OpenGL performance but after multiple tests the 40.72 still consistently displayed better 3DMark performance.

It would probably be worth running a wider range of tests on these two drivers sets, to really gauge their differences. I will probably do this in the near future but for now, I noticed no difference in stability or 'working' speed on my pc. I would recommend you stick with the newest WHQL certified drivers that work smoothly on your system, unless you are really looking for that extra few 3DMarks or FPS.

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