New ForceWare driver brings improvements

NVIDIA LAUNCHED a new driver today. Although it has been available through nZone fan-sites for some time now, the company received WHQL certification and posted the drivers on its own behalf.

Under the name 84.21, the new driver brings improvements in PureVideo codec (H.264 acceleration for GeForce 6/7) and serious improvement in performance in the favourite game of most nV execs - F.E.A.R. The performance increase is similar to the one ATI experienced back at the time of X1800 launch - with 84.21, you get around 30-40% when enabling anti aliasing. The most moderate performance improvement, 17% was noted on a 6600 DDR2 card, while 7800GTX 256MB now finally has a playable framerate when 4xAA is enabled, giving a 38% performance boost.

Most of the problems resolved were related to Dell's 30-inch monitor. The resolution of 2560x1600 brought some problemss for various nV products, which are mostly resolved with this revision of drivers.

However, there are still many things that need to get fixed, so if you're having problem with your Nvidia board, make sure you read the Release Notes, at page 17 and check whenever you have the same problem mentioned there. We advise you to always spend some time to check the release notes of both ATI and nV drivers. µ

The Inq