Page 7 - NVIDIA's ForceWare Drivers

NVIDIA's ForceWare Drivers
The upcoming pages, you'll see screenshots of the new ForceWare (previously know as Detonator) drivers. The driver we used is based on the new 52.xx series, in fact the 52.16 driver to be precise. Let's have a look.

Side note: the driver screenshots you see are based on the 5900 reference model. Except for the core and memory clock frequency the driver screenshots are 100% the same as 5950 Ultra. The driver build as supplied by NVIDIA was version 52.16 This build is very stable, installs easy as counting 1-2-3 but foremost we believe has really good image quality.

Let's have a look.

First up, OpenGL. Pretty much nothing has changed here compared to the previous builds. Let's quickly move on towards the Direct3D tab.

The Direct3D settings. Again nothing new to find here. More important settings for Image Quality are handled in another tab for both OpenGL and Direct3D. When we unlock the drivers we do get another Direct3D tab though, take a look at the next slide.

This is actually a hidden tab. You can enable it by downloading the Hidden Features patch from our Detonator driver file section. On the third page of these driver screenshots, you'll see a lot of other hidden options also. Why this tab is secret and hidden I really do not know.

Look at the tabs and you'll notice that performance is set at Quality by default where it now offers a High Performance, Performance and Quality mode for your Image Quality versus performance preference.

Here you can select Anti Aliasing (AA) up-to 8xS skewed grid modes and Anisotropic Filtering modes (AF) to 8x. Take note of the fact that the Texture sharpening setting that will crank up the AF one level has been removed.

• The High Performance mode offers users the highest frame rate possible.
• Performance mode offers users a blend between image quality and performance.
• Quality mode offers users the highest image quality while still delivering very good performance

Several properties are hidden at default and for the advanced users among us these settings are quite interesting. You can enable then by downloading the Hidden Features patch from our Detonator driver file section. The results are additional options as shown below:

New layout, here you can see you can check and change AGP settings in here and functions like Fast Writes. Quite important if you experience stability issues, not something you should temper with on the fly though.

There are also two tabs if you want to overclock with the help of the standard drivers. Leave 2D alone, 3D is what you care about for gaming performance. If you want to overclock without the use the Detonator driver properties then use a 3rd party utility like RivaTuner or NVHardpage. Also, take note of that Auto Detect feature. The card will actually detect the fastest possible overclock for you ! That's tweaking made easy.

So, just click it, sit back and relax .. and your card will be overclocked automatically. It's quite accurate to be honest, don't rely on the end result too much though. I also recommend to use this feature once your system has been warmed up (ambient PC case temperature). So go play a game for ten minutes and then use this function.