OK, so.. I'm not a total newb, and I've tried lots of different detonators, and a few modded drivers, but I never REALLY noticed the difference.. I mean, i play with AF because pure trilinear filtering bothers me, and AA when I can, though i prefer to just up the resolution SO, what I'm getting at is, why do you use modded drivers? Doesn't the quality increase mean a performance drop? And if not, why doesnt nVidia do this themselves? Just how much better is the quality?? (I'm just talking about the IQ modded drivers, not the performance ones, those make more sense... IQ down, FPS up) if someone could just clarify a bit I'd appreciate it
In some respects, it is because people come up with tweaks that Nvidia haven't fully exploited (some of which have been adopted into more recent Forceware versions). Remember that Nvidia are more concerned with supporting everything from the 7800gtx to the tnt2 in one driver - that inevitably means that they have to take compatibility with obsolete video cards over performance. Modded drivers aren't as concerned with backwards compatibility, as they accept that most people won't be trying to run doom 3 on their geforce 256. In answer to qda's question, there is a normally trade off between IQ and performance, particularly is you just use Rivatuner and the Nvidia control panel to tune your card. However, the XG drivers give the best of both worlds. They use tweaks that boost performance, but are then tuned to maximise the IQ. This means that they are still better performers than the original driver, but can also give much better IQ.
but why can't nvidia enable tweaks when a gf6800 is detected, and enable different tweaks when a tnt2 is detected? It's not like the driver treats ALL nvidia cards the same..
If they want different settings for each card, they will need a different inf file, which translates as different drivers. Nvidia are comitted to UDA, which means one driver for all cards. Not their best idea, but that's their choice.
i dunno... hard to believe that settings for every single card are stored in 1 ini file... i mean... that sounds very restricted for the world of computer programming
That's bull****. The inf file just stores description about which driver files to copy on installation for which hardware (plus a few registry settings to actually load the driver etc.). I wonder if you actually know what you're talking about. Have you ever programmed something? Do you know what the DDK is? The Nvidia driver may use a single driver file (I haven't checked), but of course they use different codepaths for each different chip they support. There is probably some codesharing on things that are done equal on every chip (or don't have anything to do with the hardware at all), otherwise UDA wouldn't make much sense. Anyways, since different codepaths are used, it would be quite easy for Nvidia to tweak the code for each chipset.
see... thats what i was thinking.... so why don't they? i mean they already do per game tweaks obviously... so wtf?
