Allen Dodd, one of our more 'mature' staff members is responsible for stress testing NVIDIA Detonator drivers. Detonator drivers are reference based driver that NVIDIA distributes to public and Graphics Card manufacturers. In general all NVIDIA Graphics Cards are supported by these drivers, most of them however should be considered Beta. You can find Allen in our forums under the nick Rumple.

• Download Detonator drivers
• Detonator driver discussion forums

Since the official release of Windows XP, opinion looks to be divided into two camps as to its merits, you either love it or you hate it. There seems to be very few taking the middle ground. For every person who swears by it, there appears to be someone else who is ready to swear at it. The opinion offered by the author of this article is based purely upon his work in composing this performance database and the problems encountered therein.

The benching rig 

• Motherboard Epox 8K3A+
• CPU AMD Athlon 1.333Ghz T’bird
• DDR Ram 512 Mb Crucial PC 2100
• HDD 20Gb Maxtor
• Graphics Winfast Leadtek A250 Ultra TD GF4 Ti 4600
• Sound None
• Monitor 19” Samsung Samtron 95p +
• CD-Rom Samsung 52x
• Case Coolermaster Tornado
• O/S Dualie 98 and XP (98 being the Primary)

Benchmark Programmes
Following the release of Madonions 3Dmark 2001 SE, it seemed the appropriate time to bid farewell to my favourite benching program, 3Dmark 2000. In its place steps what I consider to be a real gamers benchmark, Unreal 2003 Demo.The benchmark spin-off is first rate, if very demanding. So it was with the above two plus that old favourite Q3A that I set off on what was to be a bit of a stormy ride. 
 
Settings
To maintain consistency the BIOS settings were set at default and apart from the normal driver settings; no antialiasing, vertical sync always off and mipmap detail set to best performance etc, nothing else was touched. The monitor settings were adjusted to 1024x768x32-bit x 85Hz refresh rate each time and the only difference in settings to the original database figures was the CPU optimisation of 2k1 SE was set at Pure Hardware T&L.