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: News
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Detonator FX The Right Tool for the Right Job by Josh Walrath Rarely do I write a driver review, but then rarely does a set of drivers come out quite like these. The NV3x line of cards from NVIDIA have suffered at the hands of reviewers the world over, but then again the performance that these cards have exhibited has been less than appealing. Many thought that NVIDIA had finally fallen down and had produced a sub-par architecture that did not come anywhere near to performing as promised. Looking a bit closer at the situation does produce a few interesting answers. The NV3x series of chips is significantly different from anything NVIDIA has done before. While the GeForce 4 Ti series of chips are still fairly closely tied to earlier chips, the NV3x line is totally new with very little in common with past NVIDIA products. There are some holdovers from previous generations, such as the Accuview Anti-Aliasing engine, or the Lightspeed Memory Architecture, but the core of the chip is totally new. This new core is much more complex than anything NVIDIA has done before, and as such it is very hard to adequately code drivers to the new architecture in a short period of time. Since the FX 5800 was released, it has suffered from very un-optimized drivers. While these drivers worked perfectly fine (with a few bugs here and there), these were not speed optimized in the least. NVIDIA has been working very diligently behind the scenes to produce stable drivers that can actually push the hardware to where it is supposed to be. The sheer programmability of the NV3x series makes it a general purpose processor in ways. As any cpu engineer will tell you, the secret to getting the processor to perform near its theoretical speed is to optimize a compiler to the architecture. This compiler will then recompile software to run more efficiently on that processor. What drivers do for graphics chips is very similar. Drivers sit between the API (Direct 3D or OpenGL) and the hardware, and the more optimized the driver is, the more efficiently it makes calls to the hardware. This is a very basic overview, as what really happens at the driver level is almost magical in its complexity. NVIDIA has taken the Detonator series and have fixed all of the major bugs when applied to NV3x series of chips. Now it is time to optimize these drivers for speed. The Detonator FX series does exactly that. NVIDIA has done a lot of work to tweak the image quality, as well as the speed of these drivers, so any NV3x based board will benefit from this driver upgrade.
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