NVIDIA drivers boost P4 performance

A few reports from yesterday indicate that the latest leaked NVIDIA driver release (version 12.00) improves performance on Pentium 4 machines by a great deal. Up to 90% in business applications according to one sensational report on German website All-About-PC. The report was picked up by ZDNet and others in Germany and eventually translated. Gaming performance is also said to be affected, with an impressive increase of 200 3D Marks under the 2001 edition of the popular benchmark application. Reports also indicate that Windows XP performance (of all things) is improved as well. The drivers can be had from all the usual outfits including The-Ctrl-Alt-Del.com. In our testing of the GeForce 3 last week on an Athlon machine we tried out the 12.00 drivers, but 3D Mark 2001 failed to complete on several occasions, whereas with the 11.01 driver set (according to NVIDIA a release candidate) completed successfully. 12.00 performance was certainly marginally better under Windows 2000, but Windows Millenium was more or less identical. You'll recall an interesting announcement when the GeForce 3 was still several months off (no, not last week) that NVIDIA intend to build Athlon and Pentium 4 optimizations into the new Detonator driverset. Perhaps the performance boosts in version 12.00 are evidence of this in practice. On a related note, The-Ctrl-Alt-Del.com also has 12.10 drivers for Windows 2000. We haven't had the opportunity to test these, but if one of you has, particularly on a Pentium 4 get-up, we'd love some feedback on them. Related Feature - GeForce 3 Review

Source - Ace's Hardware