NVIDIA's Back with NV35 - GeForceFX 5900 Ultra

New Drivers from ATI & NVIDIA

Both ATI and NVIDIA provided us with new drivers for this review; ATI gave us their new Catalyst 3.4 drivers while NVIDIA provided us with their new Detonator FX drivers (44.03).

The Catalyst 3.4 drivers provided us with a couple of problems, the most noticeable ones were the following:

1) Performance under Doom3 was horrible, significantly lower than the older Catalyst 3.2 drivers. These drivers would also cause the game to crash in a repeatable fashion.

2) Update: The Splinter Cell issues we reported in the past are in fact an issue with Splinter Cell and enabling AA. The issues seemed to happen more with ATI because NVIDIA's drivers disable AA in Splinter Cell, hence they seemed to be related to ATI's drivers.

NVIDIA's Detonator FX drivers will be publicly available on May 14th and will improve performance across the board for all FX cards, we will be following up with a performance article later this week entailing the exact performance improvements you can expect from the Detonator FX drivers. We encountered no issues with the drivers, and we're glad NVIDIA finally changed their anisotropic filtering quality settings to match up with ATI's (as well as fix the image quality issues we've been griping about all this time):

Finally, we can have an apples-to-apples comparison between ATI & NVIDIA aniso modes