ATI vs NVIDIA: Driver performance under Win98 & Win2K

Final Words

Out of the eight games compared here, NVIDIA showed a performance drop when moving to Windows 2000 in three games; of those three only two were significant (more than 2%) deficits. 

ATI on the other hand lost ground under Windows 2000 in 6 out of the 8 games plus a seventh game would not even complete the benchmark under 2000.  Out of those 6 games where ATI dropped in performance, 5 of them exhibited more than a 2% drop.

Here's a quick summary of the results:

Today we proved that NVIDIA's Windows 2000 drivers aren't as perfect as they may seem as our test GeForce2 platform fell behind by 12 - 13% in two of the eight benchmarks when run under Windows 2000 when compared to its performance under Windows 98. 

We also managed to prove that ATI has some very serious issues that need to be tended to if they are to compete with NVIDIA going forward.  Windows 2000 is as much a power user's OS as it is a corporate OS and ATI's drivers under Windows 2000 are simply unacceptable for any gamer to tolerate.  They have definitely been getting better but they are still leaps behind NVIDIA.

It would be a great shame for the Radeon's successor to debut as a healthy alternative to the NV20 with ATI's drivers as its Achilles' heel yet again.  ATI will have around three months from the release of the NV20 to shape up their drivers for the launch of their next-generation graphics chip, let's just hope their Windows 2000 drivers are solid by then. 

As for NVIDIA, they aren't completely off the hook.  There are a few areas where performance improvement could be appreciated as we have shown by this small sample of games.  While their drivers are better than ATI's they still aren't perfect and could still use improvement.  However when building a Windows 2000-gaming system you're much better off with NVIDIA than you are with ATI simply because of drivers.  It is unfortunate since the Radeons are so aggressively priced right now.