NVIDIA graphical chips demonstrated many disadvantages in scenes, which are actively using pixel and top shaders of version 2.0 with different games that were produced in old times. Many editions performed testing with games ?Tomb Raide: Angle of Darkness?, ?Halo: Combat Evolved?, ?AquaMark3? that show these lacks. All the games and tests, built on gaming engines, demonstrated poor results. Thus, flagman NVIDIA video cards models had results of the ATI Middle-End cards level. That is the reason why NVIDIA cards received a reputation of slow DirectX 9.0 video adapters.
Actually, the reason of such behavior is in the NVIDIA drivers. The company did a lot of work to solve this problem. As a result, new NVIDIA drivers Force Ware will provide better work and avoid a low speed of shaders? work for the NVIDIA family.
New NVIDIA drivers provide not only bugs corrections and enhanced functions, but compilers of top and pixel shaders are significantly re-worked. In this way a rendering speed is improved and these changes do not affect the image quality. NVIDIA drivers changed their name due to this new algorithm of pixel and top programs processing.
The shaders processing for NVIDIA 3x video cards is not good enough for some reasons. The reason is in NVIDIA video cards? architecture, which uses a twenty three bit precision of work with float parameters. ATI cards perform all the calculation with the twenty four bit precision, which is a minimal value, allowed by the DirectX 9.0 specification. At the same time, the architecture of the NVIDIA cards FX family is more flexible than video cards, built on the DirectX 9.0 ATI chips and permit re-switching between a resources consuming thirty two bit precision and a less resources consuming sixteen bit precision of work with float numbers.
These are technical details of the NVIDIA drivers? architecture. In fact, an end user needs only to play new DirectX 9.0 games and he does not care about a shaders code compiling, a float precision, etc. NVIDIA drivers propose many opportunities for the users' management.
Settings of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are combined in one partition and have three quality settings: ?high performance?, ?performance?, ?quality?. This is a very important functionality, since a user is able to set the quality himself without choosing any presets.
The NVIDIA partition has significant improvements. The main innovation in nView 3.0 is the usage of a ?gridlines? function, which allows to perform a more efficient and convenient screen to an independent zone. If you have the professional NVIDIA video card Quadro, then you have up to nine of such screen area. GeForce video cards have only four, but it is more than enough.
The new family of NVIDIA drivers has also a support of the newest chips GeForce 5700, GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. Therefore, the new family of NVIDIA drivers Force Ware builds a good platform for the GeForce video cards functioning. It should be installed by all the gamers, who would like to obtain a new video card from NVIDIA and receive the maximal efficiency from this hardware. This product is able to satisfy the requirements of the most demanding users.