Good idea for a review

[Ali]

Ive been thinking recently about all the 'leaked' drivers leaked from nvidia, and all the 'beta' drivers from Matrox.

What I would like to see (hint hint Ant) is a review that takes two older vid cards like the G200 and the TNT1, and does some simple benchmarking with them using each revision of drivers.

Using something like Quake2 in 512, 640, 800 and 1024 in 16 bit colour with two test bed systems. One of the test beds would be a top of the line 1 Ghz system with snot loads of RAM etc, the other would be a typical system from when the vid cards were released such as a K6-2 or a P2 266 or even a 300A.

I would be very interested to see how much of an improvement both companys have made percentage wise.

would anybody else be interested in this type of test?

I would be able to do the beches with a Millenium G200 8Meg on a celeron 333A on a LX board (spare computer not being used), but I dont think my P3 600 is up to todays standards for all out grunt gaming rigs of today.

I could also get my hands on a friends TNT1 and test that.

What is needed is someone who has all the drivers. Im sure Ant has all the Matrox ones (including the wrappers), but who has a archive of Nvidia drivers?

Feedback welcome.

Ali

[fds]

You could always try to find the original disc received with the card and use the old drivers from there.

Benchmarking though is worth only that much. Compatibility, reliability and supported features are just as important as pure speed.

Then if you don't find much of a difference speed-wise between dirt old and current drivers what's the conclusion? Either there wasn't much room for improvement to begin with or the drivers are simply still bad.
And if there is a huge diff? Only shows old drivers were real bad and they got their act together. Still no proof current drivers couldn't be improved upon.

I'm playing my games, not benchmarking them.