NVIDIA 1.88 Detonator Reference Drivers: One User's Experience

Q3 Test

Hmmm... Overall, the performance is pretty damn good. While there's no absolute means by which to benchmark Q3 Test - *cough* Tom *cough* - I'll go out on a limb here and say that it seamed on par with, if not slightly better than, that of the 1.7x "leaked" reference drivers. While some say that the performance gain with the 1.88 drivers is most obvious in 32-bit color, I personally have to say that, to me, Q3 Test in 32-bit is simply unplayable, in any resolution, 640x480 and above; yes, it's smooth throughout most parts of the maps, but the stuttering and slow-downs here and there aren't what I'd call acceptable.

Image Quality is another story. Image quality, again, in MY "testing," was for the most part, identical to the 1.7x drivers, though there's a catch - artifacts. While not horrible, they're there nonetheless. Need proof? Have a gander...

Now... before you go saying, "WTF??? He picked 'em out and blew 'em up!", let me explain what I did with these .jpgs....

These were taken at a resolution of 800x600x16. Q3 Test was set to Normal, with the exception of a resolution change and the following settings:

Texture detail - MAX (slider all the way to the right)
Trilinear filtering
16-bit color-depth
16-bit textures

In "preferences," everything but "sync every frame" is enabled (though I've run it with the option enabled, too). Also, the sky was set to "high quality."

For the purpose of saving bandwidth, I shrunk the screenshots down to 512x384. The excerpts were selected, copied, and pasted from the original .tga images. This explains why the artifacting isn't nearly as apparent in the shots you see above. While in the game, they are as apparent as those shown in the excerpts.

"Artifacting" may sound kind of harsh, or perhaps you may be thinking I'm a bit anal and only trying to slam NVIDIA here. Well, you couldn't be more wrong. I'm pointing out these flaws because I SUPPORT NVIDIA, and believe that these drivers simply are NOT up to their usual standards, as they're a company that emphasizes visual quality - and usually delivers. In a nut-shell, it's a friendly kick-in-the-ass - a way of letting them know, "Nice job, but I know you can do better."

To go into a little more detail regarding this "artifacting," I should first say that the seaming and texture sparkling seen in these shots doesn't tell the entire story; while in the game, they are fairly obvious, as there are seams and sparkles lighting up the screen in random areas as the player navigates the maps. In other words, the shots I've chosen to display here are not "absolute," but rather, they are indicative of the KIND of artifacting effects that can be seen - worse in some places than in others, sometimes glaring, sometimes more subdued.

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