Legit Reviews

Seems like the 61.11 drivers will give the Geforce 6 series another boost in performance.

Our driver team has been busy with stability, bugs and performance tweaks as we get closer to the ship dates for our OEM partners and add-in card partners. Areas of interest compared to 60.72 driver include:

5% boost in Aquamark
5% boost in X2 performance
5% boost in Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness performance
10% boost to Call of Duty performance
50% improvements in Far Cry performance

The most shocking to me is the 50% improvement in Far Cry... Is this driver written just for that game or something? DAMN!

HardOCP makes a comment about this driver in their X800 review... they say something like this:

That said, NVIDIA gave us a newer set of drivers that were outlined to improve FarCry frames per second by 20% by working out some Z culling issues according to NVIDIA. These new v61.11 drivers also were saddled with IQ bugs and we did not feel comfortable testing with them as we would not have suggested them for your gaming experience.

Looks to me like NVidia sacrificed IQ for performance big time in the 61.11's... or just did such a rush job to get them to reviewers before the X800 launch that they are very poor quality... Let's wait and see how the version of nvidia drivers released after the 61.11's perform.

dudes - it really reads a lot like THG over at hard-O lately....i mean, kyle's a legend....but his staff isn't necessarily.....

everyone knows that THG n00bs are huge intel fan boys and no matter what amd does, they are consistently suffering from lack of intel inside (and don't get me started on THAT one....why the hell anyone at the big comp manufacturers thought it would be a good idea to get consumers hooked on marketing from the processor manufacturer is beyond me)....i realize that amd has taken a pretty dramatic performance hit as of late comparing intel chips to the XP series....but i'll take tru 64-bit instructions any day....as soon as devs get off their asses and rewrite their apps, we'll start to see some true performance gains...but i digress....back to hard-o....

bow down to the mighty ATI!.....wtf?....i appreciate that they may have a more powerful chipset, but i still can't run my 9800 pro full-bore in battlefield vietnam b/c DICE didn't optimize the video in the game for the 9800 pro cards......i get texture corruption when i start pushing the anti-aliasing up in the display settings....NOTE:: this is a KNOWN issue coming from DICE that's noted in the READ ME file shipping with BFV:

http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4500.html

Battlefield Vietnam - text and texture corruption when AA/AF is enabled

This issue affects the following system configurations:

* RADEON 9500/9600/9700/9800 series products
* CATALYST 4.3 Display Drivers

With a custom Anti-Aliasing/Anisotropic filtering setting enabled within the ATI Direct3D Control Panel, artifacts will appear playing Battlefield Vietnam.

ATI Engineering has been advised of the issue and is investigating.

To work around this issue, disable Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering.

INFO-BASE#4500

KEYWORDS: RADEON 9500/9600/9700/9800 for PC BATTLEFIELD VIETNAM CORRUPTION

i appreciate that the new ati cards might be more powerful when benchmarking several games...but their launch partners were pathetic....the only game of any note was HL2....nvid has partnered with developers for doom 3, call of duty, far cry (altho their performance has looked pretty weak comparatively on this one), battlefieldl vietnam, etc, etc, etc.....list goes on...

no matter how much more powerful ATI newest and badest is...if the developers are writing custom shaders for nvid cards....i'll take nvid....even if the performance is less than, i'd rather have the stability....texture corruption on BFV with one of ATI's most popular cards doesn't qualify in my book....

note to hard-o: your primary readership is still comprised of gamers...not 3d artists....you should keep in mind where the support is on the side of the game developers when listing how much better ATI cards are....what's the best video card?....depends on what you like to play...
just my $.02....
- bliSS

The 61.12 are also available
Thet should increase just a small bit on the performance!