Thresh's likes NVIDIAs (!) unified drivers...

[Pace]

From the '<a href="http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/det3/default.asp">Detonator 3 Report</a>' on Thresh's Firing Squad:

We have to credit NVIDIA for having such an elegant driver solution. The single set of Detonator drivers work with all NVIDIA cards. You can swap out your TNT2 and replace it with a GeForce 2 and Windows should be able to automatically install your new card with the existing Detonator drivers. That's definitely the main reason why we tend to use NVIDIA cards for our various test setups -they're easy to install and you don't have to look around for specific drivers whenever you want to change cards.

Hmm, NVIDIA have unified drivers...so that's why they like them...

From GA-Hardware's <a href="http://www.ga-hardware.com/features.cfm?id=matroxQA">Matrox Q & A</a>:

When you consider the market that we are specifically targeting with this offering, the corporate/commercial desktop, these users are primarily concerned with maximizing productivity. How better to do this than with DualHead, fast 2D and unified drivers?

Who all else uses unified drivers? Someone might think Thresh's guy don't like Matrox - even though they are trying to find out what set of drivers is the best for the NVIDIA cards they complain about using TurboGL for Matrox? Oh well, some people!

Paul.

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[qball]

AFAIK, Matrox's driver system is not nearly as elegant as nVidia's. nVidia's drivers are back to front and top to bottom compatible by design. That means that when they tweak the drivers for more performance, the GTS gets a boost, but so does my painfully old TNT. It means that when they design a new card, instead of having to write drivers from stratch, they already have something to work with, something that has already been heavily tweaked and revised before the card even comes out the door. It seems to be a lot like MS's WDM way of thinking, which seems logical to me.

-Q

[Pace]

Yes - I've been looking through the Detonator 3 drivers and see that there's only one set of drivers whereas (I think) Matrox still have a G200ICD and a G400ICD within the driver set - so why do they say that the drivers are unified - seems a little PR comment was exaggerated.

Also, with regards to the 618 Detonator drivers for 98 they actually slow down the TNT2U according the report (the revisited one that is) and the Win2k one's seem slightly incompatible with, er, Windows 2000. I've tried them on a few combinations now (though the same TNT2 card) and Win2k messes up in most cases.

Paul.

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