Detonator Release 60
NVIDIA has supplied NV40 reviewers with version 60.72 of the latest Detonator driver, for use with NV40. No previous driver release, Detonator 55 or otherwise, will drive an NV40, so comparison with past drivers is something quite impossible and best left to GeForce FX.
Excuse the JPEG aliasing, click here (~93KB) for a clear .png version of the same picture.
The driver identifies reviewer's samples as a GeForce 6800, rather than a 6800 Ultra, but the card is the Ultra variant. Speculation on why that's the case is something for the conspiracy theorists, given that the Ultra driver string is present and correct.
Features wise, the Release 60 driver is very similar to Release 55, including the grid lines, popup blocker and other application enhancements seen in the previous driver. There are some functional differences to appear in later versions of the driver but none are relevant to today's analysis and are the realm of a separate article.
The parts of the driver worth looking at are the setting for, finally, turning on full trilinear texture filtering, and the card's 3D clocks confirmed.
It's On by default but Off for all our performance testing. It's effect is discussed later.
Default 3D clocks now.
Again, I'll endeavour to cover the full remit of driver features in a separate article, there's too much to cover for this article and too little time to do it.
Driver Notes
The driver offers four settings for controlling overall image quality.
High Quality is broken completely. You can set it using the control panel applet as shown, but it has no effect on image quality. Trying to set it via the systray menu system confirms it can't even be set.
High Quality apparently turns off angle-adaptive anistropic filtering, for which the ability to do so would have been a boon for these initial articles on NV40, so we can evaluate its effects. A further article will have to do, fix it ASAP please, NVIDIA.
It also should turn off trilinear optimisations too, but I've forced the issue for our testing, take note.
I use Quality to test performance but turn OFF trilinear optimisations, making performance worse.
