NVIDIA's Detonator 4 Drivers: Free Performance

The Test

Much like our Detonator3 comparison we stuck to NVIDIA cards alone for this quick comparison just to show you what kinds of improvements you can expect with the Detonator 4 drivers.  We’ll have a much more thorough graphics card shootout including the latest NVIDIA drivers tomorrow.

We used three benchmarks to show off the improvements provided by the new Detonator 4 drivers: Quake III Arena, AquaMark and Max Payne.  All three of the games were run in 32-bit color, the details of their configurations is as follows:

Quake III Arena – sound disabled; graphics set to high-quality; v1.29g demo ‘four’

AquaMark – sound disabled; textures set to 24MB; FSAA disabled; pixel shader enabled for GeForce3, disabled for everything else.

Max Payne – sound disabled; double buffering enabled; trilinear filtering enabled; 32-bit textures enabled; all detail sliders set to high; ‘showextendedfps’ command was used during the cut scene between chapters 4 & 5 in part I.