Looking Back Pt. 3: The 6800 Ultra, ForceWare, and the Future
by Ryan Smith on May 11, 2006 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Far Cry
Even as early as with the GeForce 5000 series versus ATI's 9000 series, Far Cry has been a game that has performed better on ATI's hardware, making it a traditionally sour note for NVIDIA given its status as the first game to really push the abilities of SM2.0+ . Given the performance gap, however, it's also a title that seemingly offers NVIDIA great motivation to optimize, so let's see how they did.
First off, we have dropped the results for the 60.72 drivers, the 6800 series launch drivers, as we encountered numerous rendering errors within Far Cry. This seems to be due to an interaction between our patched version of Far Cry and these drivers, however as we continue on, we'll note a remarkable pattern of problems with these drivers.
Moving on to the 61.76 drivers where this problem was corrected, we're a bit surprised to see that given NVIDIA's traditionally trailing performance in this game, they were unable to improve the 6800 Ultra's performance in this game past a modest improvement when AA/AF are enabled. We honestly would have expected NVIDIA to have done something here in the past year and a half.
ForceWare 61.76 versus 84.21
Mouse over for 84.21
As for image quality, there is nothing remarkable to say. The performance of the game hasn't changed much, and neither has the image quality.
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LoneWolf15 - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
Currently they are, yes. But some years back, they sucked.That's true. However, "some years back" is around the time of the Radeon 8500, far before the 9xxx line or the X800 line. This issue is no longer relevant, and yet people who haven't used ATI cards in years flog this dead horse over and over again.
ATI isn't perfect; their multimedia cards (i.e. TV tuners) still need work in the software department. However, it's been a long time since ATI has had serious driver issues, and many who haven't had an ATI card since Rage128/Radeon/Radeon 8500 days talk as if things haven't changed.
Powermoloch - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
I've been using Ati's drivers for quite sometime, and I noticed a gradual increase of performance from my experience. Especially on the 3dmark scores lol.MrKaz - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
What’s the problem with Control Panel?I like it a lot. Ati drop it in 5.11, I keep it installed with driver 6.4 and have no problems.
poohbear - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
have u even owned an ATI card? i'm currently running a 6800gt, but my experience w/ the 9800pro was great and i dont know what u're talking about w/ your driver instability comment. maybe u should read the article again, it praises ati's driver team quite a bit.