General consensus is that performance game wise is very much the same throughout all drivers. We observe minor FPS differences mostly, except in 3Dmark05 and Doom 3. Mind you that in-between the first series 6x.xx drivers and the current 66.xx drivers a lot of time has passed. Both ATI and NVIDIA introduced legit optimizations in their drivers, meanwhile DirectX 9.0c was released, the drivers undergone a transition from being 100% AGP compatible towards PCI-Express, Shader Model 3 got supported ect ect... it's actually quite amazing that the drivers are all quite equal performance wise considering the state of the new test system. Image Quality wise I hardly noticed any real differences except a little gamma / contrast differences, nothing really interesting honestly.

We would have loved to test some additional drivers in the 60.xx series but GeForce 6800 GT and PCI-Express were not introduced back then. We did try a 60.72 driver yet it resulted in blue screens all the way; which makes sense. We'd also would have loved to do variations in driver optimization disabled and enabled. But the results you noticed today is already a result of 300 individual tests, numerous installations and most of all restarts :(

The conclusion here has to be that you need to look at the games you play the most and adapt/use drivers that get you the best gameplay/performance. At this time I highly recommend the series 66.xx and the new 71.20 drivers. Especially the last one offers a really nice performance boost in the newer games with the most important resolutions, especially with AA and AF settings enabled.

All and many more ForceWare drivers can be downloaded here.

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GeForce 6800 128MB
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